The wife of the late actor-turned-politician Vinod Khanna, Kavita Vinod Khanna, on Saturday said though she felt “abandoned” by the BJP for not giving ticket to contest the Gurdaspur seat, won by her husband four times, she would continue to support the party and Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
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At a press conference here on Vinod Khanna’s second death anniversary, Ms. Khanna said she had decided not to contest the election, but she was confident she would have won had she contested as an Independent candidate. On Tuesday, Bollywood actor Sunny Deol joined the BJP here and was named the party’s candidate for Gurdaspur.
“I was told ‘you are the candidate’. I prepared the papers but, at the last moment, they announced someone else...I felt so hurt. I understand that the party has a right to decide who the candidate is, but there is a way to do it. I felt abandoned and rejected. I was made to feel absolutely insignificant. Nobody from the party called me to say there is another candidate. I was in Delhi when he joined,” she said.
She added that she had been approached by many other political parties, but had decided to support the Prime Minister.
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“I am not going to make this a personal issue. I am going to make a personal sacrifice. I am going to put my entire might with Prime Minister Modi. India suffered a lot when we had non-NDA (National Democratic Alliance) governments...The BJP has my support, my PM has my support. At the same time, I have to insist that this can’t happen again,” she said.
When asked if she would campaign for Mr. Deol, Ms. Khanna said: “Sunny has not asked me.”
Vinod Khanna had been the MP from Gurdaspur from 1998 till 2009 and then again from 2014 till his death in 2017. The Congress won the by-election necessitated by his death in 2017.