PATNA: Film actor Sushant Singh Rajput’s cousin and former candidate for the post of president of the Patna University Students’ Union, Divya Gautam, will be the INDIA bloc candidate from Patna’s prestigious Digha seat in the upcoming Bihar assembly election. A well-known stage artist, Divya, will be facing the BJP‘s sitting MLA, Sanjeev Chaurasia. The CPI-ML, one of the constituents of the INDIA bloc in Bihar, has decided to field Divya as its candidate from the Digha seat. She will file her nomination paper on October 15, a spokesperson of the CPI-ML told TOI on Monday.An alumna of Patna University, Divya studied Mass Communication. She also served as an assistant professor at the Patna Women’s College for about three and a half years. She was active in politics since her college days. In 2012, she was AISA’s candidate for the president’s post in the Patna University Students’ Union elections, where she secured the second position. Earlier, Divya was selected in the 64th BPSC examination and allotted the post of supply inspector in the Bihar govt. But instead of doing a govt job, she chose the path of social work and research. Currently, Divya is a junior research fellow-qualified PhD research scholar.With Divya’s entry, the contest in the Digha constituency is going to take an interesting turn. The BJP is all set to field its sitting MLA, Sanjeev Chaurasia, from Digha, which is Bihar’s largest assembly constituency, having around 400 polling stations and more than 4 lakh electors. The Digha assembly seat came into existence after the delimitation exercise in 2008. In the 2010 assembly elections, Poonam Devi of JD(U) registered victory. After this, in 2015, BJP’s Sanjeev Chaurasia became the MLA. In 2020, he registered victory again by defeating CPI-ML’s Shashi Yadav. In 2020, Sanjeev received 97,044 votes, while the CPI-ML candidate, Shashi Yadav, had to be content with 50,971 votes.