By IANS,
Raipur : The Bharatiya Janata Party’s Chhattisgarh unit hopes to be ready with its list of candidates for the forthcoming general elections by next week.
Party leaders Sushma Swaraj has already taken the draft list to Delhi to place before the BJP’s central election committee Thursday. Former ministers Dilip Singh Judeo and Ramesh Bais as well as national vice president Karuna Shukla are amongst those likely to contest the 11 Lok Sabha seats in Chhattisgarh, said a party insider.
“Since Chhattisgarh is going to the polls for all the 11 seats in the first phase on April 16, the party is rushing to announce names for the state. We hope the list will be out within a week,” he said.
In the 2004 parliamentary polls, the BJP won 10 seats while the Congress bagged one. The BJP’s strength was later reduced to nine with the Congress winning the Rajnandgaon by-election, following BJP’s Pradeep Gandhi being expelled after a sting operation on the cash-for-questions scam.
The delimitation exercise has increased general seats in the state from five to six. Seats reserved for the Scheduled Caste have been reduced to one from two. The state also has four reserved Scheduled Tribe seats that remain unaffected.