Ravi Kishan to make debut from Jaunpur

Jaiswal whose name had surfaced in the coal-gate scam will contest from Kanpur.

The Congress released a list of 194 candidates on Saturday evening who are going to contest the Lok Sabha polls due in April this year.

Congress president Sonia Gandhi and vice president Rahul Gandhi will be contesting elections from Rae Bareli and Amethi, the constituencies they represent in Uttar Pradesh. Foreign Minister Salman Khurshid, sitting MP from Farrukhabad, will contest again. Sri Praksh Jaiswal, Coal Minister, whose name surfaced in the coal block allocation scam will contest again from Kanpur. Mohammad Kaif, cricketer, will be fielded from Phulpur, constituency represented by Pandit Nehru earlier. Bhojpuri film star Ravi Kishan will contest from Jaunpur, making his political debut.

Apart from 49 candidates from UP, which has 80 Lok Sabha seats, the party declared candidates from other states including Assam, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Gujrat, Haryana, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Orissa, Punjab, Rajasthan and West Bengal. The niece of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Karuna Shukla who joined Congress recently, will be fielded from Bilaspur in Chhattisgarh. Union ministers whose names were announced in the list include Sushil Kumar Shinde and Milind Deora, who will be contesting from Solapur and Mumbai South, respectively. The Congress is in alliance with NCP in the state. Two party general secretaries, Mukul Wasnik and Gurudas Kamat, and two party secretaries, Sanjay Nirupam and Priya Dutt will also be contesting elections from Maharashtra. Congress VP Rahul Gandhi had earlier offered office bearers the option to either contest the elections or hold their positions. In Assam, Manas Bora, who won the Congress primary from Guwahati, will be fielded from the seat, putting to rest speculations that he may be dropped as senior state leaders were against his candidature. Meira Kumar, Speaker of the fifteenth Lok Sabha will contest from Sasaram whereas former Kerala governor Nikhil Kumar will contest from Aurangabad in Bihar. The Congress is in an alliance with BJP in the state. Ranjita Ranjan, wife of Pappu Yadav, Bihar’s notorious muscleman, has been given a ticket from Supaul. Nandan Nilekani, who was tipped to be Congress candidate from Bangalore South, made the cut from the constituency.

Meenakshi Natarajan will contesting from the seat she won last time, Mandasaur in MP, where a Congress primary was held earlier. Abhijeet Mukherjee, son of President Parnab Mukherjee, will contest again from Jangipur seat, despite the small margin of victory he managed in the last byelection.