With days to go for the announcement of the general election, the BJP is first off the block announcing a list of 195 candidates for the Lok Sabha polls proving again that it is a relentless 24x7 election machine. The list is a carefully calibrated exercise focusing on winnability. In a move bordering on overconfidence, Prime Minister Narendra Modi also held a meeting of his Council of Ministers where he set out a 100-day action plan for his third term. The BJP list has expected names but some surprise exclusions too. Predictably, Modi, Amit Shah, Rajnath Singh and Smriti Irani return to their old constituencies, but several others have been dropped. Delhi, which reposed complete faith in the BJP giving the party all seven seats in 2019, will see new faces in all but one seat. Among the surprise exclusions are Meenakshi Lekhi, who is being replaced by Bansuri Swaraj, daughter of the late Sushma Swaraj, for the New Delhi ticket, and old warhorse Harsh Vardhan, who has been dropped from Chandni Chowk. Gautam Gambhir, who had an uninspiring stint as the East Delhi MP, opted out of the race as did Jayant Sinha, who was a doubtful prospect for the Hazaribagh seat in Jharkhand. Ramesh Bidhuri, Parvesh Verma and Pragya Singh Thakur, who have all courted controversy in the past for their hate-fuelled remarks, have been dropped, indicating that there is some unease in the saffron party over the ratcheting up of communal tensions by party members.
Despite protestations to the contrary, caste and regional considerations continue to play an important role in candidate selection for the BJP. What else can explain the retention of Ajay Mishra Teni, whose son Ashish was accused of mowing down protesting farmers, as the candidate from Lakhimpur Kheri. Another takeaway from the BJP list is that several Upper House members are being sent to seek the people’s approval. Notable among them are Jyoriraditya Scindia from Guna in Madhya Pradesh and Rajeev Chandrashekhar from Thiruvananthapuram, where the incumbent MP is Shashi Tharoor of the Congress. Shivraj Singh Chouhan has been nominated for the Vidisha seat in a move being seen as an attempt to keep him away from state politics where he still holds strong sway. The BJP has gone all out to accommodate defectors from other parties and in the process dropped several sitting MPs. The saffron party is already halfway round the track, even as the Opposition parties, notably the Congress, are nowhere near the starting block. Some seat-sharing arrangements between the I.N.D.I.A alliance parties have been decided, but the arduous task of candidate selection has not begun. There has never been a greater sense of urgency to speed up the process than now in the face of the unrelenting BJP juggernaut.
