The BJP declared on Saturday that Prime Minister Narendra Modi will run for the next Lok Sabha elections from Varanasi. Thirty-four ministers are on the party's first list of 195 candidates for the polls.
PM Modi is running for the Varanasi seat for the third time. He triumphed over AAP chief Arvind Kejriwal in 2014 and over Samajwadi Party leader Shalini Yadav in 2019.
Following a late-night gathering at his home earlier this week to choose the nominees, the BJP made its statement.
Of the 195 candidates on the initial list, 28 are women, 27 belong to the SC category, 18 to the ST category, and 57 to the OBC category, according to BJP National General Secretary Vinod Tawde.
Tawde also declared that Amit Shah, the Union Home Minister, would run for office from Gandhinagar, Gujarat. Mansukh Mandaviya, the Union Minister of Health, will run from the Porbandar seat. In Gujarat, the party has declared candidates for 15 of the 26 seats.
Additionally, the BJP declared that Union Minister of Earth Sciences Kiren Rijiju would run from Arunachal West, Member of Parliament Tapir Gao from Arunachal East, Member of Parliament Bishnu Pada Ray from Andaman and Nicobar, and Union Minister Sarbananda Sonowal from Dibrugarh in Assam.
Former chief minister of Madhya Pradesh Shivraj Singh Chouhan has been fielded from the state's Vidisha seat, while Jyotiraditya Scindia, the minister of union civil aviation, will run from Guna. Pragya Singh Thakur, the MP for Bhopal, has been withdrawn, and Alok Sharma will run in her place.
Union Ministers Rajeev Chandrasekhar from Thiruvananthapuram and V Muraleedharan from Attingal have been nominated by the BJP for the position of Kerala's nominee.
Union Ministers Arjun Ram Meghwal, Bhupendra Yadav, Gajendra Singh Shekhawat, Kailash Choudhary, and Om Birla, the speaker of the Lok Sabha, are all running in Rajasthan. State party chief CP Joshi is running from Chittorgarh, while Union Minister Kailash Choudhary is running from Barmer.
