The BJP on Thursday denied tickets to its six sitting MPs from Uttar Pradesh, including Union minister Krishna Raj and National Commission for Scheduled Castes chairman Ram Shankar Katheria.
The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party on Thursday released the first list of 184 candidates for the Lok Sabha Elections 2019.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will once again contest from Varanasi. Party chief Amit Shah will contest from Gandhinagar, Rajnath Singh from Lucknow, VK Singh from Ghaziabad, Mahesh Sharma from Gautam Buddha Nagar, Hema Malini from Mathura, Sakshi Maharaj from Unnao.
The party re-nominated Smriti Irani from Amethi who is likely to take on Congress president Rahul Gandhi.
The Gandhinagar seat is currently held by LK Advani who has been winning the seat consecutively from 1998 but now current party chief Amit Shah will be making his Lok Sabha debut from here.
Other names include Nitin Gadkari from Nagpur, Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore from Jaipur Rural, Satyapal Singh from Baghpat, and DV Sadananda Gowda from Bengaluru North.
Babul Supriyo will fight from Asansol, Kummanam Rajasekharan from Thiruvananthapuram, KJ Alphons from Ernakulam, Tamilisai Soundararajan from Thoothukudi, Kiren Rijiju from Arunachal East, Baijayant ‘Jay’ Panda, who had quit Odisha’s ruling Biju Janata Dal to join it, from Kendrapara.
In the last elections in Varanasi, PM Modi (5,81,022 votes) defeated AAP leader Arvind Kejriwal (2,09,238) by 3,71,784 votes.
In Amethi, BJP’s Smriti Irani (3,00,748) lost out to Rahul Gandhi (4,08,651) of the Congress by 1,07,903 votes.
The parliamentary constituencies in the state, which will vote on April 11 in the first phase of the Lok Sabha elections are Baghpat, Bijnor, Gautam Buddh Nagar, Ghaziabad, Kairana, Meerut, Muzaffarnagar and Saharanpur.