Anubhi Saxena
NEW DELHI | BJP announced the first list of candidates for Lok Sabha elections 2019 on Thursday which includes 184 candidates. Senior party leader J P Nadda released the list at a press conference on the festive day of Holi following three marathon meetings of its central election committee.
Senior party leader J P Nadda released the list at a press conference on the festive day of Holi following three marathon meetings of its central election committee.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will contest from Varanasi and BJP president Amit Shah will stand from Gandhinagar in place of veteran leader L K Advani. Union home minister Rajnath Singh will contest from Lucknow. Union minister Nitin Gadkari will contest from Nagpur. Minister of state for external affairs VK Singh will contest from Ghaziabad. Union minister for textiles Smriti Irani will once again contest from Amethi against Congress president Rahul Gandhi, with whom she lost in 2014 polls.
BJP’s list includes candidates from several states — Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, Uttar Prdesh, Chhattisgarh, West Bengal, Gujarat, Arunachal, Tripura.
Kiren Rijiju will again fight for Arunachal West. V K Singh and Mahesh Shamra have been standing for Ghaziabad and Gautam Buddha Nagar, respectively. In Rajasthan, Dushyant, son of chief minister Vasundhara Raje, will stand for the fourth time. BJP also chose Bengali film actress Locket Chatterjee from Hooghly.
Kerala’s Kummanam Rajasekharan, who recently quit as Mizoram Governor, will fight against Congress’s Shashi Tharoor in Thiruvanthapuram, while Union Minister KJ Alphons will contest from Ernakulam. The BJP also fielded its Tamil Nadu unit chief Tamilisai Soundararajan from Thoothukudi from where DMK’s K Kanimozhi is contesting. Baijayant Panda, who had quit Odisha’s ruling Biju Janata Dal, will be standing from Kendrapara.
The BJP also renominated Union ministers V K Singh, Mahesh Sharma, Kiren Rijiju, D V Sadananda Gowda, Babul Supriyo from Ghaziabad, Gautam Buddha Nagar, Arunachal West, Bengalore North and Asansol, respectively. It has renominated former cine star Hema Malini from Mathura. They had won from the same seats in 2014 also.
Names of 28 candidates were announced from Uttar Pradesh and dropped six incumbent MPs, including Union minster Krishna Raj from Shahjahanpur and Scheduled Caste (SC) Commission head and Agra MP Ram Shankar Katheria.
28 names have been announced each for Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal, 21 Karnataka, 16 Maharashtra, 16 Rajasthan, 13 Kerala, 10 Odisha, 10 Telangana, 8 Assam, 5 Tamil Nadu, 5 Chhattisgarh, 5 Jammu and Kashmir, 5 Uttarakhand, 2 Arunachal, 2 Tripura, 2 Andhra Pradesh, 1 Gujarat, 1 Sikkim, 1 Mizoram, 1 Lakshwadeep and 1 Dadra and Nagar Haveli.
17 names have also be finalised for Bihar but will be declared afterwards. It has been fighting a tough battle with the SP-BSP alliance in the state and is expected to drop more sitting MPs in the more days as it discloses names of its other nominees. UP sends the highest number of Lok Sabha MPs, 80, to the House and the BJP had won 71 of them in 2014. The Lok Sabha elections will be held in seven phases beginning April 11; votes will be counted on May 23.
