The BJP is displaying a curious reluctance to announce candidates for the battleground State of Uttar Pradesh, where the first phase of polling is less than a month from now.
Similarly, the BJP is maintaining suspense over whether its prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi will contest from Uttar Pradesh, even while the party’s Gujarat unit announced that he will contest at least one seat from his home State.
On Thursday, the party announced that Sushma Swaraj will contest from Vidisha (Madhya Pradesh), Shahnawaz Hussein from Bhagalpur (Bihar), Rajiv Pratap Rudy from Saran (Bihar), and Yashwant Sinha’s son Jayant from Hazaribagh (Jharkhand). SS Ahluwalia will contest from Darjeeling, where Jaswant Singh is the sitting MP. Jaswant wants to contest from Barmer, Rajasthan.
“I can definitely say that Modiji will fight elections from one seat in Gujarat,” State BJP General Secretary Vijay Rupani said. According to Rupani, the State parliamentary board met recently and decided that Modi will contest from one seat.
“Invitations have come from Ahmedabad, Rajkot, Vadodara and Surat for Narendra Modi to contest elections. Our workers wish that he should contest from Gujarat.”
This, Rupani, said has no bearing on whether Modi will contest from UP as well. The BJP’s central Parliamentary Board and the Central Election Committee (CEC) met here to discuss candidates for Lok Sabha seats in Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Bihar, Haryana, Kerala, Lakshadweep, Karnataka, Odisha, Assam, Meghalaya and Manipur.
Short time According to some CEC members, the decision on candidates for the 80 seats in UP will be taken on Sunday, March 15. The first phase of polling in UP is on April 10, so the candidates will have just about 22 days of campaigning. The BJP clearly is depending on Modi’s popularity to secure a victory as the time frame for candidates to connect with voters is too narrow to have any recall value.
Even for the States discussed on Thursday in the CEC meeting, no candidates were announced, barring Karnataka. Former Karnataka CM BS Yeddyurappa confidently declared that all eight of his nominees as well as BSR Congress leader B Sriramulu will be given tickets by the BJP.
The Thursday morning meeting of the BJP’s top decision-making body, the Parliamentary Board, was scheduled to discuss the merger of BSR Congress with the BJP, about which Swaraj had publicly expressed her reservations. Though the Parliamentary Board decided against the merger, the BJP still favoured fielding Sriramulu from Bellary.
Sriramulu is a confidant of the Reddy Brothers, who were ministers in Yeddyurappa’s Cabinet. They were jailed after their indictment by the Lokayukta and the CBI in the Obulapuram mining scam.
Sriramulu had quit the BJP, citing the “humiliation” of Reddy brothers as a major reason. The party is now fielding him as the party’s official candidate from Bellary.