NEW DELHI:
Rahul Gandhi
is likely to contest from Wayanad as the Congress Election Committee Thursday cleared the names of all the 15 sitting MPs from Kerala for the 2024
Lok Sabha elections
.
Out of 60 seats under consideration, the party cleared names for 40, prominent among them being former CM Bhupesh Baghel from Rajnandgaon in Chhattisgarh, former Manipur CM Ibobi Singh from Manipur valley and Shashi Tharoor again from Thiruvananthapuram.
Indications are that Congress will fight in Tripura in alliance with CPM, which is expected to take Tripura East.
While the nominations of Kerala MPs were cleared on the basis of the recommendation of the AICC screening committee, a senior leader said as per the party protocol, it is left to Rahul to take the final call.
Interestingly, AICC general secretary organization K C Venugopal is a likely candidate from Alappuzha seat, which the Congress lost in 2019. But it was not taken up for discussion by the CEC.
Since the three Delhi seats had three contenders each, the CEC referred it back to the screening committee for trimming it down to single names. While J P Aggarwal, Sandeep Dikshit and Alka Lamba have been recommended for Chandni Chowk seat, Arvinder Lovely and Anil Chaudhary are among those for North-East, and Raj Kumar Chauhan, Udit Raj and Krishna Tirath are potentials from North West.
The meeting headed by party chief Mallikarjun Kharge including Sonia Gandhi and others such as Ambika Soni, Salman Khurshid, P L Punia, Mohd Javed, Pritam Singh and Uttam Reddy, brainstormed on potential candidates from Kerala, Karnataka, Telangana, Delhi, and the north-eastern states of Manipur, Meghalaya, Nagaland and Tripura.
Sources said the names of seven candidates of Telangana were cleared but others have been put in the pending list because the party wants to watch the candidates of BJP before taking a final call. The seat of Khammam is among the pending ones, which, sources said, is significant because it was two months ago surveyed for Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, though it is almost ruled out now. The party also cleared eight seats for Karnataka.
The suspense over whether Rahul will contest from Amethi will lift when the list for Uttar Pradesh is discussed.
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