Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, Mar 8: Rahul Gandhi figures in Congress party’s first list of candidates released on Friday to contest in the coming Lok Sabha elections from Wayanad in Kerala. In the first list, the Congress has named only 39 candidates as against 195 candidates’ list released in its first list by the BJP earlier this week.
Besides, Rahul Gandhi, the list also includes Shashi Tharoor and the former Chhattisgarh chief minister Bhupesh Baghel who will make a debut in the Lok Sabha elections from Rajnandangaon. The former Chhattisgarh minister Tamardwaj Sahu has been named from Mahasamund seat while Jyotsna Mahant will contest from Korba, Chhattisgarh.
The party, however, has not made it clear if Rahul Gandhi would also contest from Amethi in Uttar Pradesh, the seat he held from 2002 to 2029 when he was defeated by the BJP’s Smriti Irani. The union minister for women’s welfare has already been named the BJP candidate from Amethi and she had thrown a sort of
The list includes 16 candidates from Kerala which has 20 seats in the Lok Sabha. Shashi Tharoor will fight from Thiruvananthapuram, a seat he has held for three terms. Some of the other big names on the list are Congress General Secretary KC Venugopal, who will contest from Alapuzzha in Kerala – a seat he had won in 2009 – and DK Suresh, brother of Karnataka Deputy Chief Minister DK Shivakumar, who has been fielded from Bengaluru Rural.
The names have been announced primarily for some southern and north-eastern states and the only outliers are Chhattisgarh and the Union Territory of Lakshadweep. At 16, the bulk of the candidates have been announced from Kerala, where the Congress is expected to leave the remaining four seats for its allies
The Congress has named 16 candidates in Kerala; 7 in Karnataka; 6 in Chhattisgarh; 4 in Telangana; 2 in Meghalaya; 1 each in Nagaland, Sikkim and Tripura and 1 in Lakshadweep. The list features 15 candidates from General Category and 24 Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribes and OBC candidates. The focus on the south is deliberate because not only does the Congress have its governments in the states of Karnataka and Telangana, but it is also the only region in the country where the BJP is relatively weak.
The Congress Election Committee had reportedly met on Thursday to clear names of 60 candidates from 10 states, including Kerala, Karnataka, Telangana, Delhi and Chhattisgarh.