Five sitting Congress MLAs seek nominations for Lok Sabha polls

Five sitting Congress MLAs are reported to have approached the party and sought nominations for the Lok Sabha elections,to be held on April 30 in the state.

According to highly placed sources,the legislators aspiring to contest parliamentary polls are Mukesh Gadhvi,son of former state Congress president B K Gadhvi,Vitthal Radadia,Shaliesh Parmar,Kunwarji Bawalia and Jassa Barad.

Gadhvi said he wants to contest from the Banaskantha parliamentary seat. Party sources said that Radadia,Parmar,Bawalia and Barad have applied for tickets from Porbandar,Ahmedabad (West) and Rajkot Lok Sabha seats.

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The party had fielded four sitting Congress legislators in the 2004 Lok Sabha polls as well. They were former state party president Bharatsinh Solanki from Anand,Tushar Chaudhary from Mandvi,Vikram Madam from Jamangar and Vitthal Radadia.

Solanki,Chaudhary and Madam had won,while Radadia had lost the polls.

The first meeting of the screening committee for Gujarat was held in New Delhi on Monday. Senior leaders,including state party chief Siddharth Patel,Arjun Modhwadia,Shaktisinh Gohil and Shankersinh Vaghela,attended the meeting.

The leaders were,however,unable to arrive at a final decision. Modhwadia said the candidates for Gujarat will be finalised and declared at the next meeting,which will be held on March 7 or 8.

Reliable party sources,however,said that the candidature of persons like union ministers Shankersinh Vaghela and Dinsha Patel,sitting party MPs Madhusudan Mistry and Tushar Chaudhary, and BJP-dissident Soma Patel was almost decided.

Vaghela,Patel and Mistry are to be fielded from Godhra,Kheda and Sabarkantha seats,while Chaudhary is likely to be fielded from Valsad after the Mandvi seat disappeared during the delimitation exercise.

BJP dissident Soma Patel,who helped the UPA win the trust vote in the Lok Sabha last July,would be fielded from Surendranagar.

Party sources said that Soma Patel had been promised party nomination for his vote.

The criteria for nominations would be the winnability of candidates,sources said.

In the last three months,the party carried out two exercises,one by the state party unit and another by the All India Congress Committee,for preparing the political profiles of each of the 26 parliamentary constituencies with a list of names of party workers and leaders as per their popularity.

This was done to facilitate the finalisation of the nomination list for the Lok Sabha polls.

Both reports were submitted to the party high command before February 15.

The Congress had won 12 of the total of 26 parliamentary seats in the 2004 elections. The BJP had won the remaining 14 seats.