The Bharatiya Janata Party’s second list of candidates for the Madhya Pradesh Assembly elections due later this year is a power-packed one, with seven sitting Lok Sabha MPs — three of them Union Ministers — and one national general secretary among the 39 named on September 25.
Among the Union Ministers are Narendra Singh Tomar from the Dimani seat of Morena, Prahlad Singh Patel from Narsinghpur and Faggan Singh Kulaste from Niwas have been fielded. Mr. Tomar, who holds the Agriculture portfolio at the Centre, is also the party’s election management committee convener for Madhya Pradesh. Mr. Patel and Mr. Kulaste are both Ministers of State.
In further indication of the party anticipating a tough fight in 2023, the BJP has fielded four of its other MPs — Rakesh Singh from Jabalpur West, Ganesh Singh from Satna, Reeti Pathak from Sidhi and Uday Pratap Singh from Gadarwara. Among them, Ms. Pathak, the current Sidhi MP, has been fielded from the same Sidhi Assembly constituency whose current MLA Kedarnath Shukla drew flak after the Sidhi urination incident in July. Pravesh Shukla, Mr. Kedarnath Shukla’s alleged representative, had urinated on a tribal man Dashmat Rawat causing a massive uproar against the BJP government in the State.
