Bhojpuri actor and singer-turned-politician Manoj Tiwari is a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its Delhi unit president. In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, Tiwari defeated Sheila Dikshit, a Congress veteran and former Delhi chief minister, from the North East Delhi constituency by 363,000 votes.
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Born on 1 February 1971, Tiwari is one of the six children of Chandradev Tiwari and Lalita Devi. Coming from Atarwalia, a remote village in Bihar's Kaimur district, Tiwari holds an MPEd degree from Varanasi’s Banaras Hindu University (BHU).
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Among the biggest names in the flourishing Bhojpuri cinema market, Tiwari charged as much as $90,000 per film, BBC reported in 2005.
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Tiwari made his political debut in 2009, contesting the Lok Sabha elections held that year from Uttar Pradesh’s Gorakhpur constituency on a Samajwadi Party ticket. He, however, lost to Yogi Adityanath.
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He switched over to the BJP in 2013 and contested the 2014 Lok Sabha elections from North East Delhi. He defeated the Aam Aadmi Party’s (AAP's) Anand Kumar by a margin of 144,084 votes.
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Appointed the president of the BJP's Delhi unit in 2016, Tiwari led his party to a record victory in the 2017 Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) election. Ahead of the 2020 Delhi Assembly election, there has been a buzz that Tiwari could be one of the possible chief ministerial candidates of the BJP. The party, however, has not officially named any chief ministerial face so far.
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