Excelsior Correspondent
JAMMU, Jan 4: The Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) today released its first list of 29 candidates for the Delhi Assembly polls, fielding Ashish Sood, a national office-bearer, from the Janakpuri seat.
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Sood, who is also the UT co-incharge of the BJP in Jammu and Kashmir, has been fielded against Pravin Verma of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), while Congress is yet to field the candidate on this Assembly segment.
Sood, who has played a key role in the recently concluded elections in Jammu and Kashmir, where BJP performed exceptionally well with its highest tally of 29, is among the prominent names in the party’s lineup, which also includes former MP Parvesh Verma, who will contest from New Delhi against AAP supremo and former Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, and another former MP, Ramesh Bidhuri, who has been fielded from Kalkaji, where AAP’s Chief Ministerial candidate Atishi is in the fray.
The New Delhi seat, which has been held by Kejriwal since 2013, will see the former Chief Minister take on the sons of two other former Chief Ministers.
Verma, the son of Sahib Singh Verma, who served as Delhi’s Chief Minister in the 1990s, is gearing up for the challenge.
Former West Delhi MP Verma started his preparations for the contest even before he was officially announced as the candidate, having received a go-ahead from the party’s national leadership.
The Congress candidate from the New Delhi seat is Sandeep Dikshit, the son of former three-term Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit.
The BJP’s first list features eight prominent leaders who have recently switched from Congress and AAP to join the party. Former Delhi Congress president Arvinder Singh Lovely has been fielded from the Gandhi Nagar seat in east Delhi, replacing incumbent BJP MLA Anil Bajpai. Bajpai had defeated Lovely in the 2020 polls.
Other key candidates include Tarvinder Singh Marwah, a three-time former Congress MLA from Jangpura, who joined the BJP in 2022 and will contest from the same seat against senior AAP leader and former Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia. Former Transport Minister Kailash Gahlot, who resigned from AAP and joined the BJP in November, will contest from Bijwasan.
Raaj Kumar Anand, who quit AAP earlier this year, will be the BJP’s candidate from Patel Nagar. Chhatarpur MLA Kartar Singh, who joined BJP from AAP, is fielded from the same seat. ND Sharma, another former AAP MLA, will contest from Badarpur, a seat previously held by BJP’s Ramvir Singh Bidhuri, who was elected to the Lok Sabha from South Delhi this year.
The BJP has also fielded its national office-bearer Dushyant Kumar Gautam from Karol Bagh. BJP National Secretary Manjinder Singh Sirsa will contest from Rajouri Garden, which he won in the 2015 elections.
The BJP also retained several incumbent MLAs, including OP Sharma (Vishwas Nagar), Leader of Opposition in the Assembly Vijender Gupta (Rohini), Ajay Mahawar (Ghonda), and Jitendra Mahajan (Rohtash Nagar). Former Delhi BJP President Satish Upadhyay will contest from Malviya Nagar, while former MLA Manoj Shokeen will challenge Delhi Minister Raghuvinder Shokeen in the Nangloi Jat seat.
The BJP is yet to announce candidates for the remaining two seats it won in the 2020 polls – Laxmi Nagar and Karawal Nagar.
The elections to the 70-member Delhi Assembly are due next month. The BJP is pulling out all the stops to end AAP’s hold on power in the city since 2013, except for a brief period when Delhi was under President’s rule.
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