Dehradun, Mar 2 (PTI) The BJP on Saturday fielded its sitting MPs from three out of the five Lok Sabha seats in Uttarakhand as it announced the first list of candidates for the upcoming parliamentary elections.
As the party currently holds all the five seats, it not announcing the candidates for the two other seats — Haridwar and Garhwal (Pauri) — has given rise to speculation that the two incumbents might miss out.
Union Minister of State for Tourism and Defence Ajay Bhatt has been declared a candidate from his Nainital-Udhamsingh Nagar constituency, Tehri royal Mala Rajya Lakshmi Shah from Tehri Garhwal, and Ajay Tamta from Almora, the lone reserved SC seat in the state.
The two seats for which candidates are yet to be announced are Haridwar, currently represented by former chief minister and Union minister Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank, and Garhwal (Pauri), held by Tirath Singh Rawat.
Nishank won the high-profile Haridwar seat in 2014 as well as in 2019. He won it by a margin of 1,77,822 votes in 2014 and by 2,68,729 votes in 2019.
The seat was won by Congress heavyweight Harish Rawat in 2009. But his wife Renuka could not hold onto it in 2014 when Nishank emerged victorious.
Tirath Singh Rawat, who had a brief stint as the chief minister of the state before being replaced by Pushkar Singh Dhami, had won the Garhwal (Pauri) seat in 2019 by 3,02,669 votes, defeating BJP veteran and former chief minister Bhuvan Chandra Khanduri’s son Manish who made his electoral debut that year as a Congress nominee. PTI ALM ALM TIR TIR
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