NEW DELHI, January 20: Still hopeful of a nod from Sonia Gandhi, the Congress screening committee for Uttar Pradesh today `kept aside' Amethi, Rae Bareli and Sultanpur even as it cleared candidates for at least 50 other parliamentary constituencies in the State.But the fate of Balram Jakhar, now linked with that of P V Narasimha Rao, continued to hang in balance as the party released the list of 48 candidates - including those whose names had been withdrawn earlier by Sitaram Kesri - but once again held back Rajasthan.The Congress, meanwhile, has decided to give a tough fight to Prime Minister Inder Kumar Gujral in Jalandhar. It has fielded Umrao Singh, a former deputy speaker in the Punjab Assembly, from the constituency. It is argued that with the guaranteed support of the BSP, Singh, a popular leader who had won this seat in 1992, will give Gujral a run for his money. With neither the Akali Dal nor the BJP fielding anyone from Jalandhar, it will be a straight contest between Gujral and Singh.Thecandidates selected by the UP screening committee will now be placed before the party's Central Election Committee (CEC) for clearance. Sources disclosed that the screening committee which met for three hours this evening had decided to renominate three of the four sitting MPs in the dissolved Lok Sabha: Ratna Singh from Pratapgarh, N.D.Tiwari from Nainital and Begam Noor Banu from Rampur.The candidature of Captain Satish Sharma, who was elected from Amethi last year, still remains undecided but this is mainly because the leadership expects Sonia to contest from either here, Rae Bareli or Sultanpur, the constituencies most favoured by the Gandhi family.But infighting never seems to leave the Congress. The UP screening committee, it is learnt, has more or less cleared the candidature of party vice president Jitendra Prasada's son, Jayan Prasad, from Shahjahanpur. This prompted the main aspirant for the seat, Mamta Khandelwal, to meet Kesri in the afternoon and lodge a complaint against what she has described as a clear-cut case of nepotism, sources said.Another star son facing the heat is Hemvati Nandan Bahuguna's son Vijay Bahuguna whom the party is keen to field from Tehri. But the son, unlike his father, is not acceptable to several Uttarakhand leaders for they see him as an ``outsider''. The party is now being pressured to pit Bahuguna in Pauri against his own close relative Major B.C.Khanduri of BJP who had won this seat in the last election.The three-hour screening committee meeting - it has yet to consider nominations for some 32 other seats in UP - was attended by, among others, CWC members Jitendra Prasada, Arjun Singh, Tariq Anwar and N.D.Tiwari.The second list released by the party consists of 35 candidates in West Bengal, seven in Punjab, one in Chandigarh, two in Goa and one each in Mizoram, Manipur and Meghalaya.Congress spokesman V N Gadgil lost his cool yet again when asked why the party was dithering in releasing the list of Rajasthan candidates. ``I am not obliged to disclose the reasons. It is an internal matter of the party,'' he said.
