Prime Minister NarendraModi will fight to retain his Varanasi seat while BJP president Amit Shah will make his debut in LokSabha polls from Gandhinagar, BJP leader JP Nadda announced on Thursday.
The Gandhinagar seat is currently held by veteranBharatiyaJanata Party leader LK Advani, who has been winning the seatconsecutively from 1998.
Among the prominent leaders announced in BJP’s first list,which had 184 names across 20 states, were Union Ministers Rajnath Singh, whowill contest again from Lucknow, NitinGadkari from Nagpur, general VK Singh(retd) from Ghaziabad, Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore (Jaipur Rural), SatyapalSingh (Baghpat), and DV SadanandaGowda (Bengaluru North).
All are sitting MPs from these seats.
Union minister SmritiIrani will again face Congresspresident Rahul Gandhi in Amethi, while film actress-turned politicianHemaMalini will contest from her Mathura seat.
Union minister Babul Supriyo will fight to retain his Asanolseat, where he will face Trinamool Congress’s Moon Moon Sen. The BJP has alsofielded Bengali film actress Locket Chatterjee from Hooghly.
BJP’s Kerala strongman KummanamRajasekharan, who recentlyquit as Mizoram Governor, will fight against Congress’s ShashiTharoor inThiruvanthapuram, while Union Minister K.J. Alphons will contest fromErnakulam.
The BJP also fielded its Tamil Nadu unitchiefTamilisaiSoundararajan from Thoothukudi from where DMK’s K. Kanimozhi iscontesting.
Nadda, who had announced that Minister of State from HomeKirenRijiju will contest from Arunanchal East, later corrected himself, sayinghe would be contesting from Arunachal West.
The BJP also fielded Baijayant ‘Jay’ Panda, who had quitOdisha’s ruling BijuJanata Dal to join it, from Kendrapara.
Nadda also announced that candidates for all the 17 seats itwill contest in Bihar have been cleared by the party’s Central ElectionCommittee and sent to the state election panel.
With veterans such as L K Advani and B C Khanduri beingdropped from their LokSabha seats by the BJP, it seems that the party may havedecided to ease out several of its old guards from electoral politics afterkeeping them out of government by introducing an age bar of 75 years.
In anticipation of the party leadership’s move, seniorleaders like Kalraj Mishra and Bhagat Singh Koshyari had announced theirunwillingness to contest the coming LokSabha polls.
The fate of another party veteran, MurliManohar Joshi, whohad won from Kanpur in 2014, remains uncertain as the party did not announceits candidate from the seat in the first list which was released on Thursday.
However, party sources said it is unlikely now that Joshiwill be fielded in the general election.
The 91-year-old Advani, the longest serving BJP president who enjoyed the final say in organisational affairs for decades, had been winning from Gandhinagar seat in Gujarat since 1998. PTI