BJP releases 11 more LS names, Mahtab among four defectors

A notable inclusion in the list was that of former IPS officer Debashish Dhar from West Bengal’s Birbhum seat, where he will contest against three-time TMC MP Satabdi Roy. Dhar was suspended as Cooch Behar SP after the 2021 West Bengal Assembly elections during which four people were killed in Sitalkuchi area in alleged firing by central forces. On March 20, the IPS officer resigned from service citing “personal reasons”. The other candidate from Bengal is Pranat Tudu, a doctor who will be pitted against TMC’s Kalipada Soren in Jhargram.

The BJP has so far named candidates to 40 out of the 42 seats in West Bengal. The Diamond Harbour seat, which Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s nephew Abhishek Banerjee represents, is one of the two seats it is yet to name candidates for.

In Odisha, Mahtab will contest from the prestigious Cuttack constituency, which he has been representing since 1998 as part of the BJD. The son of Odisha’s first chief minister Harekrushna Mahtab, he recently resigned from the regional party expressing displeasure over its functioning. Mahtab will take on BJD’s Santrupt Misra, former HR head of Aditya Birla Group.

In the communally-sensitive Kandhamal, the BJP fielded Sukanta Kumar Panigrahi, who has a strong RSS background. The BJD has been winning the seat since 2009, when it broke off ties with the BJP. Panigrahi will face BJD’s Achyuta Samanta, who won the seat in 2019. The BJP has named Rabindra Narayan Behera, a technocrat, from Jajpur, a seat reserved for Scheduled Caste candidates. He will contest against the current MP, BJD’s Sarmishta Sethi. With these three names, BJP has announced candidates for all 21 seats in Odisha.

In Punjab, the BJP’s inaugural list of six candidates includes three turncoats. Among them is Preneet, who is former Punjab CM Amarinder Singh’s wife. Punjab has 13 Lok Sabha seats. While Ravneet Singh Bittu, who defected from Congress to BJP on March 26, will contest from Ludhiana where he is the current MP, Sushil Kumar Rinku, a former AAP leader who joined BJP on March 27, has been fielded from Jalandhar. Rinku won the Lok Sabha bypolls from the same seat last year.

Preneet, a former Congress MP from Patiala who switched to the BJP in March, has been fielded from Patiala again.

Hans Raj Hans, a Sufi singer-turned-politician, and retired diplomat Taranjeet Singh Sandhu will contest from Faridkot and Amritsar, respectively. Hans Raj Hans is pitted against Karamjit Anmol, a singer and actor close to Punjab CM Bhagwant Mann. The party also decided to field Dinesh Singh ‘Babbu’, a seasoned MLA, from Gurdaspur in place of actor Sunny Deol.