The Congress on Saturday came out with its fourth list of 45 candidates for the upcoming Lok Sabha elections, fielding veteran leader and Rajya Sabha MP Digvijaya Singh from Rajgarh and ex-Union minister Kantilal Bhuria from Ratlam in Madhya Pradesh, former BSP leader Danish Ali from Amroha in Uttar Pradesh and ex-IAS officer Sasikanth Senthil from Tirvallur in Tamil Nadu replacing sitting MP K Jayakumar. The party has fielded UP Congress president Ajai Rai from Varanasi to take on Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In Tamil Nadu, the Congress dropped two MPs - Jayakumar and A Chellakumar. In Krishnagiri, which Chellakumar represented, the party fielded K Gopinath. Five sitting MPs - S Jothimani (Karur), Karti Chidambaram (Sivaganga), Manickam Tagore (Virudhunagar), Vijay Vasanth (Kanyakumari) and M K Vishnu Prasad (Cuddalore) have been repeated. Vishnu Prasad is the sitting MP from Arani seat. He has now been shifted to Cuddalore, which was with the DMK last time. The party renominated sitting MP Kuldeep Rai Sharma from Andaman and Nicobar Islands and fielded controversial leader Chaudhary Lal Singh from Udhampur, Kawasi Lakhma from Bastar, former AICC secretary Prakash Joshi from Nainital-Udhamsingh Nagar and ex-Uttarakhand Chief Minister Harish Rawat’s son Virender Rawat from Hardiwar . Lakhma is a sitting MLA from Konta. He replaces sitting MP and Chhattisgarh Congress president Deepak Baij in the Bastar seat. Lal Singh, who hails from Kathua district in Jammu and Kashmir, returned to the Congress a few days ago. He had left the Congress to join the BJP ahead of the 2014 Lok Sabha elections after the former denied him a ticket. He resigned from the BJP in the wake of uproar over his participation in a rally in support of the accused in the rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl in Kathua in January 2018. In UP, the suspense over whether Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra would contest from the Amethi and Raebareli seats respectively continued as the party announced candidates for nine seats. Among them are former MPs Imran Masood from Saharanpur and Pradeep Jain Aditya from Jhansi, P L Punia’s son Tanuj from Barabanki, Akhilesh Pratap Singh from Deoria, Sadan Prasad from Bansgaon and Ram Nath Sikarwar from Fetehpur Sikri. Among the candidates announced in MP are Guddu Raja Bundela, the son of two-time former Congress MP Sujan Singh Bundela, from Sagar. Guddu Raja joined the Congress in September last year, just ahead of the state Assembly elections. In Assam’s Lakhimpur, the party has fielded Uday Shankar Hazarika, who left the BJP and joined the Congress a few months ago.
