Lucknow: It is final now. Bharatiya Janata Party prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi will contest the coming Lok Sabha elections from Varanasi. The incumbent from the holy city, Murli Manohar Joshi will now face the electorate from Kanpur. BJP national president Rajnath Singh is the party candidate from Lucknow while the incumbent Lalji Tandon may go to Rajya Sabha. The names of 54 candidates announced in Delhi late on Saturday night included a dozen from UP. While former chief minister Kalyan Singh is not contesting, his son Rajbir Singh is the party candidate from Etah. Former Madhya Pradesh chief minister Uma Bharti is the party candidate from Jhansi while veteran party leader Kalraj Mishra will contest from Deoria. Varun Gandhi from Sultanpur and Yogi Adityanath from Gorakhpur are not surprises, as are Sakshi Maharaj from Unnao and PK Gangwar from Bareilly. The announcement ended the day long suspense over the list. The state office of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Lucknow wore a deserted look through the day on Saturday with a couple of vans of television news channels parked outside and their crew ready with their cameras. The few party office bearers present there also waited for news from Delhi about the party tickets for a few key seats in Uttar Pradesh. Vijay Bahadur Pathak, the state spokesman of the party said the party cadre was enthused with the news and will plunge into campaigning from tomorrow. Narendra Modi. Reuters. Narendra Modi. Reuters. Only Sunil Bansal, a representative of the RSS who has been working in close coordination with Amit Shah, party’s incharge for UP, was holding a meeting with party workers and organisers to finalize the movement of mini-trucks adorned with party’s banners and posters – named Modi rath – across the state. What went unnoticed in the expectant air was the fact that 13 trucks loaded with steel and steel items donated by people for Narendra Modi’s ambitious Statue of Unity project in Gujarat left for Kanpur on way to Ahmedabad. “The steel was collected by the party workers from different areas,” he said, adding that more trucks may be moving out in the coming days. The BJP’s central election committee meeting began in Delhi around 4 pm on Saturday and it is learnt that the focus of the meeting was on seats in UP, even though the names for Uttarakhand, Delhi, Haryana and Punjab were supposed to be decided. Polling in all these states is supposed to take place from April 10 onwards. The shifting of Narendra Modi, Murli Manohar Joshi, Rajnath Singh and Kalraj Mishra to different seats within UP had remained a contentious issue for many days with various combinations being tried to arrive at a solution. A day earlier, reports from Delhi and Ahmedabad had suggested that Modi may not come to UP at all, preferring to contest from a seat in Gujarat and thus not upsetting Joshi. For Rajnath Singh, however, Lucknow was seen to be a viable option and the incumbent Lucknow MP Lalji Tandon’s protestations were to be addressed in some other manner. Great confusion and bickering have marked the ticket finalization exercise, especially for UP. State BJP leaders say it is quite “democratic” for such things to happen because the party does not follow a high command culture. “Leaders who want to contest election from a particular place for some reason come up with their arguments and the party leadership cannot just agree or disagree, therefore they postpone a decision,” a BJP office bearer said. Senior leader Kalraj Mishra is quoted as a case in point. He had been a member of Rajya Sabha for long contested an election for the first time in 2012 and became the MLA from Lucknow East. He will now contest from Deoria. “Even if he wins because of the prevailing pro-BJP wave, it will be a win-win situation for him and the party,” reasoned the state leader. Murli Manohar Joshi is another case in point. He had lost the 2004 election from Allahabad and managed to win from Varanasi in 2009. Although Joshi wants to contest again from Varanasi, it was considered appropriate for Modi to contest from there. “For Joshi, Kanpur is a safe enough seat for him, said a state leader. Another reason for the delay is the clamour for tickets among those who have joined the party recently. These include former chief minister Kalyan Singh, his son Rajbir Singh, Congress leader Jagdambika Pal, Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, Kirti vardhan Singh, among others. Former Madhya Pradesh chief minister Uma Bharti was said to be the choice of a section of the party from Faizabad, replacing another firebrand leader Vinay Katiyar. It is learnt that Pal was being considered to contest from Domariaganj, and Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh wanted his son Prateek to contest from Kaiserganj. In Gonda, former SP MP Kirti Vardhan Singh was being considered for the party ticket. In Allahabad, a protest was staged in front of the BJP office on Friday against the reported entry of “outsiders.” The BJP workers also raised slogans saying Bahari pratyashi nahi chalega (candidates from outside will not be acceptable.) The reference was to the reported overtures former BSP MLA and minister Nand Gopal Gupta Nandi was making to join the BJP and be fielded as the party candidate from Allahabad. Nandi had earlier defeated veteran BJP leader Kesarinath Tripathi in the 2007 Assembly election from Allahabad. Meanwhile, the notification for the first phase of Lok Sabha election in the state was issued on Saturday. In this phase, polling is to be held in ten seats of western UP - Saharanpur, Kairana, Aligarh, Bijnor, Meerut, Baghpat, Ghaziabad, Gautambudh Nagar, Bulandshahr and Muzaffarnagar. The scrutiny of the candidates’nomination papers will be done March 24 and the last date of withdrawal from the election race is March 26. Prominent among candidates of other parties featuring in this phase are Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) president Ajit Singh from Baghpat, Jaya Prada on an RLD ticket from Bijnor and film actor Naghma on a Congress ticket from Meerut. Read more at: firstpost/politics/modi-rajnath-and-joshi-bjps-election-2014-focus-is-now-on-up-1436543.html?utm_source=ref_article
Posted on: Sun, 16 Mar 2014 07:19:44 +0000
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