New Delhi: Congress election committee, headed by party president Mallikarjun Kharge, met on Thursday night and finalised most of the candidates for six of the ten states it was considering for the upcoming Lok Sabha elections. The first list of candidates will be released on Friday, sources said to Zee News Television.
Senior party leader KC Venugopal, who attended the meeting along with former chief Sonia Gandhi, said that a formal announcement will be made soon. “We finalised seats from Kerala, Karnataka, Telangana, Chhattisgarh, Delhi and Lakshadweep… The procedure is going on, formal announcement will be made very soon,” he told reporters.
Zee News’ sources said that Rahul Gandhi, who is leading the party’s Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra in Jaipur, did not join the meeting virtually as he was expected to. His name for the Wayanad seat in Kerala has been suggested by the party’s screening committee. He is likely to contest from the seat again, as he is the sitting MP from there.
However, it is not clear yet if Rahul Gandhi will also contest from Amethi, his old bastion, or if Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, the party’s general secretary, will make her electoral debut. There is a strong demand among Congress workers for Priyanka Gandhi to contest from Raebareli, the seat vacated by her mother Sonia Gandhi to contest Rajya Sabha polls.
Some of the likely names in the first list are Shashi Tharoor from Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala, Bhupesh Baghel from Rajnandgaon, Tamradhwaj Sahu from Durg, Jyotsna Mahant from Korba, and Shiv Dehariya from Janjgir-Champa in Chhattisgarh. All the key leaders from Chhattisgarh will be in the fray, sources said to Zee News TV.
In Karnataka, which has a Congress government, the party has not decided on 4-5 seats yet. The party will not field state ministers, sources said, as most of them are reluctant to contest the national elections. Two ministers have openly expressed their reservations. Only one minister could be a candidate if he chooses to contest, sources added.
Among the candidates from Karnataka is DK Suresh, the brother of state party chief DK Shivakumar and a party MP. The party has not taken a decision on Kalburgi, the seat of Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge. There were reports that Kharge’s son-in-law Radhakrishna Doddamani was a frontrunner for the ticket, but the seat was not discussed at the meeting
The Delhi Congress unit submitted a long list of candidates for the seven Lok Sabha seats in the capital. The high command asked the unit to shortlist some names and come back for the final approval. Sources said that the names of JP Agrawal, Sandeep Dikshit, and Alka Lamba were considered for the Chandni Chowk seat.
From Northeast Delhi, the names of Arvinder Singh Lovely and Anil Chowdhary were proposed. From Northwest Delhi, the names of Rajkumar Chauhan and Udit Raj were in contention. The committee will meet again on Monday to finalise the remaining candidates.