Sunil Sangwan, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) candidate who won from the Dadri Assembly segment in Haryana’s Charkhi Dadri district, was a jail superintendent in the Haryana Prisons Department. Sangwan, who won the Haryana Assembly election against his nearest rival Manisha Sangwan of the Congress by 1,957 votes, was reportedly superintendent of the jail where the Dera Sacha Sauda chief Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh was lodged.
In Dadri, while the BJP candidate received 65,568 votes, his Congress rival polled 63,611 votes, followed by 3,713 votes for Sanjay Chhaparia, an independent candidate.
The son of former Dadri MLA and ex-minister Satpal Sangwan, Sangwan joined the Haryana Prisons Department in 2002 and remained in government service for over 22 years until he took voluntary retirement in 2024. During his tenure, he served as a superintendent of several jails, including the Sunaria jail in Rohtak for five years, where Dera chief Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh is serving a sentence for the rape of two women disciples and the murder of a journalist, Ram Chander Chhatrapati, according to a report by The Print.
Sangwan was reportedly the jail superintendent on six of the 10 occasions when Ram Rahim was released on parole or furlough so far. He resigned from his post as superintendent of Bhondsi (Gurugram) prison last month and joined the Bharatiya Janata Party ahead of the announcement of tickets for the assembly polls.
As per The Print report, his request for voluntary retirement was processed at lightning speed by the Haryana Prisons department. In a mail, the Director General of Prisons in Haryana reportedly instructed all state jail superintendents to send no-dues certificates in favour of Sangwan the same day.
Soon after that, he was given the ticket from Dadri in place of wrestler Babita Phogat, who was the saffron party's candidate for the seat in the 2019 polls. In 2019, Sangwan's father contested the polls from the same seat on the Jannayak Janta Party (JJP) ticket. He received 29,577 votes (23.38 per cent), losing to Independent candidate Somveer Sangwan. Phogat had got the third position.