BJP Announces Candidate List for Rajasthan Assembly Elections

Guwahati: Bharatiya Janata Party, for the upcoming Rajasthan assembly elections, declares a list of 131 candidates on Sunday night. The list seems to have introduced 25 new faces including the dropping of at least one minister.

The newly declared list of candidates shows the dropping of sitting minister Surendra Goyal. Goyal is replaced by senior leader Devi Singh Bhati’s daughter- in-law Poonam Kanwar.

Apart from this change, several new names could be found in the list, particularly, in the Shekhawati area where the BJP is on a weak wicket.

Union minister JP Nadda announced the declaration of their candidate list while addressing a press meet in Delhi. Speaking about the candidate list, Nadda said that of the 131 candidates, there are 12 women, 32 youth, 17 SC and 19 ST candidates. Moreover, there are 85 sitting MLAs and 25 new faces in the list. Further, the minister5 also added that while preparing the candidates list, they have kept this in mind that all castes and regions should get a representative of its own in the list. As the candidates for the remaining 69 seats are not announced, that too will be announced soon.

Among the senior BJP leaders, Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje, ministers Gulab Chand Kataria, Rajendra Rathore, Arun Chaturvedi, Shrichand Kriplani, Kiran Maheshwari, Vasudev Devnani, Anita Bhadel and Prabhulal Saini are repeated for the forthcoming assembly polls. In addition to these repeated names, minister and senior leader Kalicharan Saraf’s name is not included in the first list indicates and chances are that he could be dropped as well.

The process of filing of nominations will begin from Monday and continue till November 19 and the Rajasthan assembly elections is scheduled to be held on December 7.

However, the final list of candidates came only after several rounds of talks in Rajasthan and Delhi. It is for finalizing this list that Chief Minister Raje was in Delhi since the last two days. The meeting for list was held at Rajasthan election in-charge Prakash Javadekar’s residence with Raje and BJP national president Amit Shah being present in the meeting. The meetings continued during the day on Sunday before the parliamentary board meeting in the evening and prime minister Narendra Modi, Shah and other senior leaders were also present in it.

Also read: Party to contest Rajasthan polls under Raje: BJP leader