Advani decides to contest, Purohit dropped

NEW DELHI, Jan 12: BJP president L K Advani has put aside his reservations and is to contest the Lok Sabha elections after all, from the Gan...

NEW DELHI, Jan 12: BJP president L K Advani has put aside his reservations and is to contest the Lok Sabha elections after all, from the Gandhinagar seat, while prime ministerial candidate Atal Behari Vajpayee will stand again from Lucknow. In the BJP’s first list of 202 candidates from 15 States, released this evening, most sitting MPs have been renominated; nine have been dropped.

It appears that the party has used the ticket distribution exercise to try and straighten out internal feuds in States like Delhi, Himachal Pradesh and Maharashtra.

height="1px" style="display:none;">

Thus, former Delhi Chief Minister Madan Lal Khurana is a reluctant candidate (probably putting paid to his ambition to be CM again); former Himachal CM Shanta Kumar and his rival, the State unit president, will both contest for the Lok Sabha; while sitting MP from Nagpur Banwarilal Purohit (who was engaged in a running battle with the party’s powerful general secretary, Pramod Mahajan), has been dropped. According to a late night ENS report, Purohit has decided to take on the official candidate, Ramesh Mantri, as an Independent. The confidants of Purohit, who was a Congress MP before he switched over to BJP in 1991 over his differences with the party on Ayodhya issue, have ruled out his return to the Congress fold As expected, senior BJP leaders Murli Manohar Joshi (Allahabad), Rajmata Vijayaraje Scindia (Guna), Pramod Mahajan (Mumbai North East), Sushma Swaraj (South Delhi), K.L. Sharma (Outer Delhi), Uma Bharti (Khajuraho) and Sunder Lal Patwa (Chhindwara) are all to contest from their old seats.

Story continues below this ad

The candidates for other seats will be decided when the party’s central election committee meets again on January 20 and 21. The question of whether to field a candidate against Prime Minister I K Gujral in Jalandhar was not taken up.

In Karnataka, the BJP and Ramakrishna Hegde’s Lok Shakti are to contest 18 and 10 seats respectively. Both parties are to conduct a joint election campaign. The seat sharing agreement was announced by Advani earlier in the day. Seat adjustment with the AIADMK in Tamil Nadu is also almost final.

The BJP is likely to contest five seats in the State, candidates for four being announced today. Senior leader K. Jana Krishnamurthy (who is to contest the Madras South seat) left for Chennai today for the final round of talks.

Also announced today was the entry of Ram Dhan, former Jan Morcha leader, ex-MP and former chairman of the SC/ST Commission, into the BJP, besides former Congress MP from Assam, Ishwar Prasanna Hazarika. A former CPI leader from Himachal Pradesh, Kishen Kumar Kaushal, also joined the BJP — the first Leftist to do so.