BJP sweats out Varun Gandhi for Pilibhit  Lok Sabha ticket

By Manish Anand

New Delhi, March 20: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is shortly likely to announce candidates for the remaining 24 Lok Sabha seats from Uttar Pradesh. The BJP top brass had held marathon deliberations last night to finalise the third list of the candidates.

Reports claim that the incumbent BJP MP Varun Gandhi has procured four sets of nomination papers through his associates from Pilibhit. The BJP is yet to announce the nominations of Varun Gandhi and his mother Maneka Gandhi for the Lok Sabha elections. The BJP in the first list of the candidates had repeated all the candidates for the Lok Sabha elections.

However, the growing buzz within the BJP suggests that the party may deny nominations to a few incumbent Lok Sabha MPs and unveil new faces in the electoral ring. Former Congress leader Jitin Prasada is in the reckoning to bag the nomination of the BJP from the Pilibhit parliamentary constituency. In such an event, Varun Gandhi is widely believed to throw his hat into the electoral ring as an Independent candidate.

Varun Gandhi is a three term Lok Sabha MP from Pilibhit. He had won his maiden election from Pilibhit in 2009. He was also the BJP national general secretary briefly during 2013-14. However, he has been seen to have frosty relations with the new dispensation in the BJP as he failed to make either into the council of ministers or the national office bearers of the party.

Varun Gandhi had been sharply critical of the Lakhimpur Kheri incident in which the son of the BJP MP Ajay Mishra Teni from there had run his car over a group of agitating farmers. Teni has once more been fielded by the BJP from the Lakhimpur Kheri constituency.

While Varun Gandhi hogged limelight in the BJP when the party was helmed by LK Advani, he has been seen on the sidelines after the advent of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the national politics. But he is known to have nursed his parliamentary constituency well. His following in the area is also known to be noteworthy. It’s also noted in the BJP circle that Varun Gandhi has enough weight in Pilibhit to carry the burden of electioneering on his own. The constituency has sizable Sikh voters who are also known to be loyal to Varun Gandhi.

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About The Author

Manish Anand

Manish Anand is a senior journalist with more than two decades of hardcore reporting on beats such as Prime Minister’s Office, Parliament, BJP, Congress, Planning Commission, NITI Aayog, and scores of Union Ministries.

His past has been with The New Indian Express, The Asian Age/Deccan Chronicle, and The Statesman.

For about 15 years, Manish was also a regular commentator and host for talks on AIR on foreign affairs.

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