Chandigarh: Three defectors, a singer, and an ex-diplomat are part of the first list of six candidates declared by the Bharatiya Janata Party in Punjab for the forthcoming parliamentary elections.
Punjab will vote for its 13 parliamentary seats on 1 June, and the BJP has announced it will contest the election alone. The ruling Aam Aadmi Party has already declared seven candidates for the election.
Of the six candidates announced by the BJP, three are Sikhs and the rest are Hindus.
Sushil Rinku (48) the lone AAP Member of Parliament who joined the BJP last week, is the party’s candidate from Jalandhar, a seat he won in a by-poll held last year.
Rinku was among the list of the first eight candidates announced by the AAP, which has yet to announce another candidate in his place.
This is the third party Rinku has joined in less than two years. He had unsuccessfully contested the assembly elections in 2022 as the Congress candidate from Jalandhar West, going up against Sheetal Angural of the AAP. Angural, too, is now with the BJP.
From Patiala, the BJP has fielded Preneet Kaur (79) a sitting Congress MP and wife of former chief minister Capt Amarinder Singh, a former Congressman who bitterly parted ways with the party in 2021 and floated his own outfit, Punjab Lok Congress, which he eventually merged with the BJP.
Preneet Kaur, a four-time MP and a former union minister, was suspended from the Congress for “anti-party activities” last year after she started openly supporting her husband during BJP’s programmes and finally joined the BJP earlier this month.
Ravneet Singh Bittu (48), another sitting Congress MP who defected to the BJP last week, is the party’s candidate from Ludhiana. The grandson of Punjab’s late chief minister Beant Singh, Bittu is a three-time MP, having won from Ludhiana in 2014 and 2019, and Anandpur Sahib before that in 2009.
Former chief minister Beant Singh had been credited with ending two decades of militancy in Punjab. Bittu, too, has openly condemned Sikh hard-liners in the state.
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BJP’s other candidates
Among other candidates, the BJP has fielded Punjabi Sufi singer Hans Raj Hans (61), who joined the party in 2016 and won the 2019 parliamentary elections from the reserved seat of North West Delhi.
Although he was expecting to once again contest the election from Delhi, the singer will now go up against Punjabi actor-singer Karamjit Anmol, an AAP candidate and a political greenhorn, in Faridkot, another reserved seat.
Retired diplomat Taranjeet Singh Sandhu (61), who joined the BJP earlier this month, is the party’s candidate from Amritsar, chosen for his deep connection with the holy city. His grandfather was among the founding members of the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC).
A 1988-batch Indian foreign service officer, Sandhu has served as an envoy to several nations — including the US. This is his first foray into politics.
Amritsar has been with the Congress since 2014, with union ministers such as the late Arun Jaitley and Hardeep Puri unsuccessfully contesting from here in the past.
The BJP had last won this seat in 2009, when cricketer-turned-politician Navjot Singh Sidhu, who was then with the party, had won it.
Sandhu will be up against AAP cabinet minister Kuldeep Singh Dhaliwal.
In Gurdaspur, the BJP, for the first time in a decade, has fielded a non-celebrity, replacing actor and sitting MP Sunny Deol with a BJP old-timer, Thakur Dinesh Kumar ‘Babbu’ (61). Babbu, a former deputy speaker of the Punjab assembly, is a former three-time MLA from Sujanpur, having last won the seat in the 2017 assembly polls but losing to Congress’s Naresh Puri in 2022.
Gurdaspur has been an important seat for the BJP for nearly three decades. In that time, the BJP lost the seat only twice — in 2009, when Congress’s Partap Singh Bajwa beat BJP MP and veteran actor Vinod Khanna to win it, and in the 2017 parliamentary bypoll, when the current BJP chief Sunil Jakhar, then in the Congress, won it after Khanna’s death.
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