The Bharatiya Janata Party has released its fifth list of candidates for the Lok Sabha elections with several seat surprises .The list included the names of 111 candidates including Dharmendra Pradhan, Arun Govil, Ravi Shankar Prasad, and others.
The party has released the names of the candidates for the Lok Sabha seats of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Odisha, Rajasthan, Haryana, Maharashtra, West Bengal, Kerala, Karnataka, Goa, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Mizoram, Sikkim, Telangana, West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh.
Dharmendra Pradhan will seek a return to the Lower House of Parliament with the BJP fielding him from Sambalpur. BJP party Spokesperson Sambit Patra will contest from Puri again . He lost in 2019 elections .
The party has fielded four women – Aparajita Sarangi (Bhubaneswar), Sangeeta Kumari Deo (Bolangir), Malvika Keshari Deo (Kalahandi) and Anita Subhadarshini (Aska)
The party has also fielded veteran actor Arun Govil, who played the character of Lord Ram in Ramanand Sagar’s Ramayan from Uttar Pradesh’s Meerut.
Maneka Gandhi from Sultanpur, drops Varun from Pilibhit.
Former Congress MP Naveen Jindal who joined the BJP will contest from Haryana’s Kurukshetra on a BJP ticket. Jindal represented the Kurukshetra constituency in the Lok Sabha for two terms (2004-2014). However, he lost to the BJP’s Raj Kumar Saini in the 2014 national elections and was not fielded by the Congress in 2019.
Bollywood actress Kangana Ranaut has been fielded from Himachal Pradesh’s Mandi, a stronghold of Congress.
The BJP dropped Union ministers Ashwini Kumar Choubey and V K Singh from their respective Lok Sabha seats.