AAP leader Manish Sisodia looks on as actress Gul Panag adjusts her cap after joining the party in Chandigarh.
Actor and former Miss India Gul Panag, an Aam Aadmi Party candidate for next month's general election, is at odds to explain her "NaMo for PM" tweet just two years ago.
The actor, who has eight lakh followers on twitter, had in a series of messages in 2012 backed
Narendra Modi for the country's top job.
"That was when there was no AAP around. You look for no alternative and find the one-eyed in a land of the blind. It is not a choice. Narendra Modi for PM was something that came from resignation and a sense of fait-accompli,'' Ms Gul clarified to reporters on Thursday.
In one of her tweets in support of the BJP's prime ministerial candidate, she had commented, "SC supervised SIT gives clean chit to NaMo. HC slams him. The latter is on front page and the former buried deep inside."
Ms Gul, whose father Lieutenant General (Retd) H S Panag is one of the founding members of AAP, joined the party yesterday and was immediately named its candidate for Chandigarh. She replaces Savita Bhatti, widow of popular satirist-cum-actor, the late Jaspal Bhatti, who pulled out of the race earlier this week.
"Chandigarh is my home. I was born and brought up in Chandigarh. Like you, I also want an atmosphere of clean politics,'' she told reporters while campaigning in the city, sporting the trademark AAP cap and dark glasses.
Ms Gul faces former union minister Pawan Kumar Bansal, a three-term Congress heavyweight, whose candidature was cleared last night. Mr Bansal, 65, had to resign from the Union Cabinet in May after his nephew Vijay Singla was arrested for allegedly accepting bribe to facilitate a plum posting for a senior official in the Railways. A CBI probe, however, gave a clean chit to Mr Bansal two months later for want of evidence.