NEW DELHI: A few days before the Delhi assembly elections are to be announced, and amid a blitzkrieg unleashed against the ruling AAP, the BJP finally released its much-awaited first list of candidates on Saturday.
It has 29 names, including four sitting legislators, two former MPs and eight former MLAs.
The biggest names on the first list are former West Delhi MP Parvesh Verma, who has contested against AAP chief Arvind Kejriwal in the New Delhi assembly constituency, and former South MP of Delhi, Ramesh Bidhuri, who will take on Chief Minister Atishi in Kalkaji. The Congress has fielded Sandeep Dikshit, former MP from East Delhi and son of late former CM Sheila Dikshit, from New Delhi, and All India Mahila Congress chief Alka Lamba from Kalkaji. It will be a triangular contest for both seats and the result will be highly anticipated.
Four former Delhi ministers – Kailash Gahlot and Raaj Kumar Anand, who served in the outgoing AAP government, and Arvinder Singh Lovely and Rajkumar Chauhan, who held key portfolios during Sheila Dikshit’s tenure as CM, from 2003 to 2013 – also They received tickets. While Gahlot was moved from Najafgarh, which sent him to the assembly in 2015 and 2020, to Bijwasan this time, Lovely replaced BJP MLA Anil Kumar Bajpai in his old bastion of Gandhi Nagar. Bajpai was elected on an AAP ticket in 2015, but later switched sides and won the 2020 elections as a BJP candidate.
Anand, who left the AAP in April last year, briefly joined the BSP and contested the 2024 Lok Sabha polls and later joined the BJP, will contest from the reserved Patel Nagar constituency, which he won in 2020. Chauhan has been filed from Mangolpuri reserved constituency. . Another former Congress MP, Tarwinder Singh Marwah, will contest from Jangpura, a seat he held during the Congress government, against former deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia, who has moved from Patparganj.
This seat will also witness an interesting contest with former mayor Farhad Suri as Congress candidate.
The elections will be held in February. While the AAP has already declared its candidates for all 70 seats, the Congress has named 48.
Delhi BJP president Virendra Sachdeva said the 29 candidates announced by the party are strong and will act as catalysts for change in the city. AAP Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Singh said the BJP’s first list of candidates included names of those who used abusive language in Parliament and those caught distributing cash in their constituencies.