The Bharatiya Janata Party's list of candidates for the upcoming Chhattisgarh assembly elections, released yesterday, is likely to set up a "Baghel vs Baghel" fight in a key constituency. The BJP is bringing back Durg MP Vijay Baghel into the state polls battleground, hoping he unseats his uncle, Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel, from the Patan seat. It is not yet clear though if the Chief Minister will contest from his stronghold.
Vijay Baghel, who heads the 31-member 'Ghoshna Patra Samiti' or poll manifesto committee of the BJP for the upcoming polls, had defeated Bhupesh Baghel in the 2008 assembly elections from the same seat. This was his debut in the state assembly. In 2013, however, he lost to Bhupesh Baghel. He did not contest the 2018 state polls. In the 2019 general election, he contested against Pratima Chandrakar of the Congress from Durg and won by a margin of close to four lakh votes.
The Bharatiya Janata Party which is eyeing a comeback in Chhattisgarh in the coming assembly elections on Thursday released its first list of candidates for 21 seats where it had faced defeat last time.
There are 16 fresh faces on the list, most of them representatives of district panchayat bodies, while five candidates are former MLAs. The list contains five women.
The election schedule for the 90-member Chhattisgarh assembly is yet to be announced.
Of the 21 seats for which nominees were announced by the BJP, ten are reserved for Scheduled Tribes (ST) and one for Scheduled Castes (SC). All these 21 seats are currently held by the Congress.
The BJP reportedly seems to have declared candidates in the first list for the seats where there were not many differences within the party over the nominees.
While in 2018 the BJP drew a blank in all of these 21 seats, even in 2013 (when it retained power in the state) it suffered defeat in 16 of these seats.
A BJP leader told news agency PTI that the party is not very strong in these 21 seats, hence the candidates were announced early so that they get ample time to go to the people and connect with them.
In 2018, Congress had won 68 of total 90 seats, while the BJP finished a distant second with 15. The JCC (J) bagged five and its ally, BSP, two seats.
The Congress currently has 71 MLAs.
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