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Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah and Defence Minister Rajnath Singh have retained their Parliamentary constituencies for 2024 General Election. They are part of the list of 195 candidates announced on Saturday.
The list has no big surprises, except that four sitting MPs from Delhi have been replaced. The party has fielded a Muslim candidate from Kerala. The Minister of State for Electronics & IT, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, will contest from Thiruvananthapuram, where he is expected to face Congress leader Shashi Tharoor.
The list has 34 members from the Council of Ministers. There are 28 women candidates, 27 candidates from the Scheduled Caste category, while the number of candidates from the Scheduled Tribes is 18. There are 57 candidates from Other Backward Caste category. The party said that 47 candidates are below the age of 50 years.
While Prime Minister Modi will contest from Varanasi, Shah and Singh will file their nominations from Gandhinagar and Lucknow respectively. Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla will contest from Kota in Rajasthan, again. The Minister for Earth Science Kiran Rijiju has been fielded from Arunachal West in Arunachal Pradesh. Smriti Irani, the Women & Child Development Minister, will contest from Amethi again.
Changes in Delhi
The party announced candidates for five out of seven seats in Delhi. Four of the sitting MPs have been changed. While the late Sushma Swaraj’s daughter Bansuri Swaraj has been fielded in place of Meenakshi Lekhi, well-known trade & business leader Praveen Khandelwal will fight from Chandni Chowk in place of Harshwardhan. Former Delhi Mayor, Kamaljeet Sehrawat, has been given ticket from West Delhi in place of Hans Raj Hans. Rambir Singh Bidhuri will fight from South Delhi in place of Ramesh Bidhuri. Only one of sitting MP — Manoj Tiwari (North East) — has been given ticket again so far. Candidates for two constituencies, Delhi East and Outer Delhi, are yet to be announced,
Two former chief ministers — Shivraj Singh Chauhan from Vidisha in Madhya Pradesh and Biplab Kumar Deb from Tripura West — will contest the elections. Two turncoats, Ritesh Pandey (from Ambedkar Nagar in UP) and Geeta Koda (Singhbhum in Jharkhand), have been given tickets by the party. Sadhvi Pragya Thakur has been dropped from the Bhopal seat and Alok Sharma has now been fielded.
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