Bharatiya Janata Party veteran Murli Manohar Joshi will not contest the 2019 Lok Sabha elections from anywhere as he has been denied a party ticket.
In a letter to the people of Kanpur, Joshi said: “Dear people of Kanpur, General Secretary of the BJP Ramlal conveyed to me today that I should not contest the ensuing parliamentary election from Kanpur and elsewhere.”
Murli Manohar Joshi is one of the founding members of the BJP, along with former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and LK Advani.
Earlier last week, the BJP had replaced veteran leader LK Advani with party president Amit Shah in Gandhinagar Lok Sabha constituency while announcing the first list of 184 candidates for the Lok Sabha Elections 2019.
Advani has represented Gandhinagar for six time since 1991. Vajpayee has also represented the Gandhinagar in 1996.
There has been no official word from the party or the 91-year-old leader, who was its longest serving president, on his name not finding a place among the BJP’s candidates for the poll.
Meanwhile, there were reports that Advani was “extremely upset” over the way in which his name was dropped from the BJP list of candidates for the upcoming Lok Sabha elections.
Joshi, 85, had left his Varanasi seat for Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He then won the 2014 elections from Kanpur.
A number of veteran leaders, including Shanta Kumar, BC Khanduri and Kariya Munda- all in their 80s- have not been fielded by the BJP in the polls, seen as part of its strategy under PM Modi and Amit Shah to ease them out and groom younger leaders in their place.
LK Advani along with Murli Manohar Joshi, was moved out of the BJP’s highest decision-making body, Parliamentary Board, in 2014 after Prime Minister Narendra Modi led the party to victory and Shah was made its president.
Both veterans were made members of ‘Margdarshak Mandal’ (group of mentors), a body which has never met.