The names were announced by senior BJP leader JP Nadda at a press conference in Delhi.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Thursday released its first list of 184 candidates for the upcoming Lok Sabha elections, most of them from Uttar Pradesh.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will again contest from Varanasi Lok Sabha seat while BJP president Amit Shah has been fielded from Gandhinagar in Gujarat.
Home Minister Rajnath Singh has been fielded from Lucknow while Union Minister Smriti Irani has been pitted against Congress president Rahul Gandhi in Amethi
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"VK Singh will contest from Ghaziabad, Hema Malini from Mathura and Sakshi Maharaj from Unnao," Union Minister JP Nadda announced at a press conference.
Nitin Gadkari, another cabinet minister in the Modi government, will contest from his traditional seat of Nagpur.
State-wise names of BJP Lok Sabha candidates here
Most of the ministers in the Union Cabinet, who are sitting Lok Sabha MPs, have been fielded from the same seats barring a few exceptions.
Senior BJP leader and former Union Minister Kalraj Mishra, currently an MP from Uttar Pradesh's Deoria, had already announced that he would not contest the polls.
In Bihar, Nadda said, names for all 17 seats have been cleared by the CEC and have been sent to state Election Committee. The NDA, as a group, will release all the names, Nadda said.
Here are some prominent faces of the BJP and the seats from where they will contest the Lok Sabha elections:
- Narendra Modi - Varanasi
- Amit Shah - Gandhinagar
- Rajnath Singh - Lucknow
- Nitin Gadkari - Nagpur
- VK Singh - Ghaziabad
- Smriti Irani - Amethi
- Kummanam Rajasekharan - Thiruvananthapuram
- Arjun Ram Meghwal - Bikaner
- Rajyavardhan Rathore - Jaipur
- Jitendra Singh - Udhampur
- Jugal Kishore - Jammu
- Sofi Yousuf - Anantnag
- Khalid Jehangir - Srinagar
- Tirath Singh Rawat - Garhwal
- Maya Rajlaxmi - Tihri Garhwal
- Ajay Bhatt - Nainital
- Dr Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank - Haridwar
- Ajay Tamta - Almora
The BJP's central election committee (CEC), which held several meetings to finalise candidates for the Lok Sabha polls, approved the names at a meeting on Thursday.
The meeting, besides Prime Minister Narendra Modi, was attended by top brass of the BJP, including party chief Amit Shah, Rajnath Singh, Sushma Swaraj and Arun Jaitley.
This was the fourth meeting of the CEC, BJP's highest decision-making body, on the selection of candidates.
On Tuesday evening, it had held a seven-hour-long discussion to deliberate upon the names of party's candidates in various states. The party had announced that it will drop its all 10 incumbent MPs from Chhattisgarh and replace them with new faces, a decision that comes in the wake of the party's drubbing in the recent assembly elections.
Another meeting was held again on Wednesday but no final decision on the names was taken.
The election for 543 parliamentary seats will be held in seven phases till May 19 and the counting of votes will be taken up on May 23.
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