By IANS,
Bhopal : Heavy police force has been deployed at the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) Madhya Pradesh state office in Bhopal since Tuesday following growing protests over its selection of candidates for the forthcoming assembly elections.
Supporters of more than a dozen legislators have so far turned up from their respective constituencies to lodge their protest against the party decisions. The polls to the 230-seat state assembly are scheduled for Nov 27.
Protests also continued for the fourth day Wednesday as over 2,000 party workers arrived here to protest against the candidature of Finance Minister Raghavji from Vidisha constituency.
Raghavji is a legislator from Shamshabad constituency, but this time he has been fielded by the party from Vidisha, thereby denying a ticket to legislator Gurucharan Singh.
The party workers said any candidate other than Singh was not acceptable to them at Vidisha.
“Our legislator has been denied a ticket simply because the state leaders including Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan wanted to disturb both Raghavji and Gurucharan knowing well that both were well entrenched in their respective constituencies and any other candidate will not be able to make it through,” said a worker from Vidisha.
Hundreds of BJP workers protesting the candidature of Chetram from Amla constituency also arrived in the afternoon and held demonstration at the party office in Bhopal. Soon the police force surrounded the office to prevent any ugly incident or fracas from breaking out.
BJP workers from Amla constituency in Betul district raised slogans against Chetram, and claimed the party would lose heavily if the candidate was not changed.
Earlier in the day, the Sindhi Samaj Sangharsh Samiti protested the candidature of Jitendra Daga, said to be the choice of senior BJP leader Sushma Swaraj. The Samaj wants Bhagwandas Sabnani to contest from the state capital’s Huzur constituency.
Sabnani, it is said, was brought back to the party fold from Uma Bharati’s Bharatiya Jan Shakti (BJS) Party a couple of weeks ago with the promise that he would be fielded from the constituency.
“We (the community) would field Bhagwandas Sabnani as an Independent candidate if the BJP doesn’t give him the ticket,” Samaj’s spokesman Dharmendra Bulchandani told reporters.