PM Modi To Contest LS Polls From Varanasi, Amit Shah From Gandhinagar

New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi will contest the upcoming Lok Sabha polls from Varanasi, which is his current parliamentary constituency, while BJP party President Amit Shah will contest elections from Gandhinagar.

The first list of the 184 candidates was released this evening by BJP’s Central Election Committee (CEC) Secretary JP Nadda.

The highlight of the list is Shah replacing party veteran L K Advani for the Gandhinagar Lok Sabha constituency. Shah is currently a Rajya Sabha MP.

Union home minister Rajnath Singh will contest the elections from Lucknow, with Nitin Gadkari contesting from Nagpur.

VK Singh will contest from Ghaziabad, Hema Malini from Mathura, Sakshi Maharaj from Unnao, and Smriti Irani from Amethi

The list of 184 names, covered 20 states including Bihar, West Bengal, Karnataka, Rajasthan, Mizoram, Arunachal Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, Jammu and Kashmir, Uttar Pradesh and Jharkhand among others.

The release of the list followed three days of marathon meeting of the CEC attended by the Prime Minister, the BJP president and other senior party leaders from the centre as well as the states. Some reports had attributed to the delay in the release of the list to hard bargaining among senior leaders for a seat of their choice.

Prominent faces whose names have found mention in the first list along with their Parliamentary constituencies are as follows:

Uttar Pradesh:

Sanjeev Kumar Balyan-Muzaffarnagar
Satya Pal Singh-Baghpat
Mahesh Sharma Gautam-Buddha Nagar
Rajeev Singh (Raju Bhaaiya)-Etah
Santosh Kumar Gangwar-Bareilly

Maharashtra:

Heena Vijaykumar Gavit-Nandurbar
Hansraj Gangaram Ahir-Chandrapur
Poonam Mahajan-Mumbai-North-Central
Pritam Gopinath Munde-Beed

West Bengal:

Arjun Singh-Barrackpore
Rahul Sinha-Kolkata Uttar
Anupam Hazra-Jadavpur
Locket Mukherjee-Hooghly
Bharati Ghosh-Ghatal
Dilip Ghosh-Medinipur
Babul Supriyo-Asansol

Andhra Pradesh:

D Purandeshwari-Vishakapatnam

Rajasthan:

Col.Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore-Jaipur Rural
Arjun Ram Meghwal-Bikaner

Karnataka:

D V Sadananda Gowda-Bangalore North
G S Basavaraju-Tumkur

Arunachal Pradesh:

Kiren Rijiju-Arunachal East