The Congress released its first list of candidates for 15 seats for the upcoming Lok Sabha elections, naming UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi as the party’s candidate from Rae Bareli and Rahul from Amethi.
The list comprises 4 Lok Sabha seats in Gujarat and 11 in Uttar Pradesh where a formal alliance with the three-party combine led by Akhilesh Yadav, Mayawati and Ajit Singh did not work out.
SP’s Akhilesh Yadav and BSP’s Mayawati have, however, already announced that their front would not contest elections from Rae Bareli or Amethi to ensure that they did not cut into the anti-BJP votes in seats represented by the Congress president and his mother.
This, Mayawati has explained, was to ensure the two leaders were not tied down to their constituencies during campaigning.
Akhilesh Yadav often counts this arrangement as evidence that the Congress hadn’t been left out in the cold. But a Congress leader indicated that the last word on the arrangement was yet to be said. “Back channel talks are going on between the parties to arrive at some arrangement,” a leader said.
Also on Thursday’s list of 11 candidates from Uttar Pradesh are former Union minister Salman Khurshid from Farrukhabad and RPN Singh from Kushi Nagar.
The other candidates include, Imran Masood from Saharanpur, Saleem Iqbal Shervani from Badaun, Jitin Prasad from Dhaurahra, Annu Tandon from unnao, Rajaram Pal from Akbarpur , Brij Lal Khabri from Jalaun (SC) and Nirmal Khatri from Faizabad.
From Gujarat, the list covers Raju Parmar from Ahmedabad West, former state Congress president Bharatsinh M Solanki from Anand, Prashant Patel from Vadodara and Ranbjit Mohansinh Rathwa from the reserved tribal seat of Chhota Udaipur.