The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Thursday released the first list of 184 candidates for the upcoming Lok Sabha elections.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will contest from Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh again, while BJP chief Amit Shah will contest from Gandhinagar, Gujarat in place of LK Advani.
In 2014, PM Narendra Modi contested from Varanasi as well as Vadodara in his home state Gujarat. After winning both, he decided to retain the holy city in Uttar Pradesh.
In Varanasi, he won with a huge margin over his rivals Arvind Kejriwal and Congress's Ajay Rai. Varanasi will vote on May 19, in the last round of seven-phase polls that start on April 11. The results will be declared on May 23.
Union ministers V K Singh, Mahesh Sharma, Smriti Irani, Kiren Rijiju, Jitendra Singh to fight Lok Sabha polls from Ghaziabad, Noida, Amethi, Arunachal East, Udhampur respectively, BJP said.
Union minister Babul Supriyo will fight to retain his Asansol seat, where he will face Trinamool Congress's Moon Moon Sen. The BJP has also fielded Bengali film actress Locket Chatterjee from Hooghly.
BJP's Kerala strongman Kummanam Rajasekharan, who recently quit as Mizoram Governor, will fight against Congress's Shashi Tharoor in Thiruvananthapuram, 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.
JP Nadda, who had announced that minister of state from home Kiren Rijiju will contest from Arunachal East, later corrected himself, saying he would be contesting from Arunachal West.
The BJP also fielded Baijayant 'Jay' Panda, who had quit Odisha's ruling Biju Janata Dal to join it, from Kendrapara.
Nadda also announced that candidates for all the 17 seats it will contest in Bihar have been cleared by the party's Central Election Committee and sent to the state election panel.
The BJP announced its candidates from many states, including Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Chhattisgarh, West Bengal, Rajasthan, Arunachal Pradesh and Tripura.
The BJP has finalised names of all 17 party candidates from Bihar and sent the list to the state unit which will announce it jointly with allies, Nadda said.
Lok Sabha elections will begin on April 11 and continue for over a month till May 19 across seven phases, followed by counting of votes on May 23.
The polling will be held on April 11, April 18, April 23, April 29, May 6, May 12 and May 19 for 543 Lok Sabha seats across the country in which nearly 90 crore voters would be eligible to vote.
(With inputs from agencies)
First Published: Mar 21, 2019 7:40 PM IST
