- Monday, February 24, 2025
Rahul Gandhi, former president of the party, will contest from his current seat of Wayanad in Kerala.
By: Shubham Ghosh
INDIA’S main opposition Indian National Congress on Friday (8) announced its first list of candidates for the upcoming general elections, less than a week after the country’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of prime minister Narendra Modi announced its first list featuring 195 names.
The Congress’s first list, however, included only 39 seats and they included some top ones — including former president Rahul Gandhi, former federal minister Shashi Tharoor and former chief minister of the central state of Madhya Pradesh, Bhupesh Baghel.
Gandhi, 53, will contest from the Wayanad constituency in the southern state of Kerala where he won by a big margin in the 2019 general election. It was not clear, however, whether he would contest from Amethi, his previous constituency where he lost to the BJP’s Smriti Irani, India’s women and child welfare minister.
Read: Priyanka Gandhi to make electoral debut in 2024, to contest from Raebareli: report
In the first list of candidates for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, Congress CEC has selected 39 names.
• 15 candidates are from the General category
• 24 candidates are from SC, ST, OBC and minority groups
• 12 candidates are below 50 years of age
• 8 candidates are in the… pic.twitter.com/YbH1dVuaLb— Congress (@INCIndia) March 8, 2024
Gandhi was elected as an MP from Amethi, a bastion for his family in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, in 2004, 2009 and 2014.
Gandhi was disqualified as an MP from Wayanad for a few months in March last year in connection with his controversial remark against the Modi surname at an election rally in 2019. He later received a relief from the Supreme Court of India and got back his parliamentary seat.
Tharoor, who is a three-time MP from Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala, will contest from there again. The contest in Thiruvananthapuram will be one of the top draws of this year’s election as the BJP has fielded the current junior minister of information technology and electronics — Rajeev Chandrasekhar — from there.
Baghel, who has been mainly a state-level politician, will contest from Rajnandgaon in Chhattisgarh.
Some other prominent names that figured in the Congress list are general secretary KC Venugopal, who will contest from Alappuzha in Kerala, a seat he had won in 2009, and DK Suresh, brother of the deputy chief minister of the southern state of Karnataka, DK Shivakumar. Suresh has been fielded from Bangalore Rural constituency, where he has won in the 2014 and 2019 elections.
Sixteen of the 39 candidates named in the first list of the Congress are from Kerala and it is likely to leave the remaining four Lok Sabha seats to its allies.
Seven names have been announced from Karnataka, six from Chhattisgarh and four from Telangana. The remaining candidates fielded are from the north-eastern states of Meghalaya, Tripura, Sikkim and Nagaland and the island of Lakshadweep.
The reason for the Congress to focus mainly on southern India in its first list is perhaps because it has governments in two states from that region — Karnataka and Telangana — while the BJP is relatively weak there.
Venugopal himself announced the names of the candidates at a press conference in New Delhi. He said 24 of the 39 candidates announced are from the Other Backward Class, Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and minority communities. He said the names were finalised by the Congress’s Central Election Committee.
The Grand Old Party is currently in the middle of finalising seat-sharing arrangements with its allies. Recently, it has finalised arrangements with some other parties in the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance, such as the Aam Aadmi Party, Samajwadi Party and Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray). Talks were still underway with Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, the ruling party of Tamil Nadu.
