Party veteran LK Advani, whose name along with Joshi, had figured among the star campaigners for Bihar election in 2015, is also not in the list, which included a battery of top leaders beginning with Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
As the Bharatiya Janata Party released a list of 40 star campaigners for the first two phases of Uttar Pradesh election, several names were conspicuous by their absence. Varun Gandhi, Vinay Katiyar, Murli Manohar Joshi and Manoj Sinha -- all MPs from the state -- were among those missing from the list.
Party veteran LK Advani, whose name along with Joshi, had figured among the star campaigners for Bihar election in 2015, is also not in the list, which included a battery of top leaders beginning with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. While Varun Gandhi, the Sultanpur MP who has had a strained relationship with the party leadership, was not in the list, his mother Maneka Gandhi, a Union minister and Pilibhit MP found a place among the campaigners.
Interestingly, Katiyar, a former state party president and one of the faces of the Ram Temple movement, was dropped but hardliner Gorakhpur MP Yogi Adityanath was included. Sultanpur and Gorakhpur go to polls in the fifth and sixth phases.
The campaigners included party chief Amit Shah besides senior ministers -- Rajnath Singh, Arun Jaitley, Nitin Gadkari and Venkaiah Naidu. However, Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar, who was seen as someone who symbolised the cross-LoC surgical strikes, and who is a Rajya Sabha member from UP, also is not in the list.
Among the other ministers who would be campaigning were state leaders such Kalraj Mishra, Uma Bharti and Sanjeev Balyan. Modi himself is an MP from Varanasi.
BJP’s Muslim face from the state Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, VK Singh and Nishad leader Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti are among the star campaigners. Mathura MP and yesteryear Bollywood star Hema Malini added the glamour component to the list. It also included Chief Ministers of Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan.
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