New Delhi: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) released its fifth list of candidates for the 2024 Lok Sabha polls on Sunday (March 24), with 111 candidates on the list. Prominent names on the list include actors Kangana Ranaut and Arun Govil from the Mandi seat in Himachal Pradesh and Meerut seat in Uttar Pradesh, respectively. Both are first-time contestants and have been vocal in their support for the BJP.
Another (in)famous name on the list is former Calcutta high court judge Abhijit Gangopadhyay, who resigned from his post recently to join politics after delivering a slew of judgments criticising the Trinamool Congress government in West Bengal. As The Wire has reported, several experts believed his decision went against judicial propriety.
While many of the candidates in the listed constituencies are repeat candidates from the 2019 elections, there are a few exceptions. Varun Gandhi, who is the sitting MP from Pilibhit but has made a number of remarks criticising party policy, especially regarding farmers, in the last few years, has been dropped by the BJP. However, his mother Maneka Gandhi has been given the ticket from Sultanpur again.
Other prominent names left out of candidacy this time are Union minister Ashwini Choubey and BJP’s Hindutva posterboy in Karnataka Anantkumar Hegde. Hegde created a controversy recently by claiming that the Narendra Modi-led party wanted more than 400 seats this time so that it could change the Constitution. Choubey is the sitting MP from Buxar in Bihar, but Mithlesh Tiwari has been given that ticket this time.
Dharmendra Pradhan, a Union minister who is the BJP’s national face from Odisha, has been shifted to the prestigious Sambalpur seat from his home seat Dhenkanal, which he had lost earlier.
Among the other announced candidates for the party is a woman from Sandeshkhali, Rekha Patra, from the Basirhat Lok Sabha seat. Patra is one of the women who filed a police complaint against alleged gender violence from TMC leaders in the area.
Some defectors have also made their way to the list. Jagadish Shettar, who recently switched back to BJP, has been fielded from Belgaum instead of his home turf Hubbali-Dharwad. Also, former Congress MP and industrialist Naveen Jindal, whose company donated a lot of money in electoral bonds, had switched to the BJP and has been given the ticket from Kurukshetra, his former constituency.
Jindal isn’t the only electoral bonds buyer to make it to the list – Pallavi Dempo from the Dempo family, a prominent business house which is the biggest electoral bond donor to the BJP in Goa, has been fielded from the South Goa seat.
