Mandi native Kangana Ranaut and Meerut native Arun Govil will compete. Maneka Gandhi will run from her Sultanpur seat while Varun Gandhi withdrew from Pilibhit.
The BJP released its fifth list of 111 candidates for the Lok Sabha election of 2024 on Sunday. Among them were Arun Govil of Meerut and Bollywood star Kangana Ranaut from Mandi. Both Kangana, who has frequently described herself as a devotee of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and Arun Govil, who portrayed Ram in the well-liked TV series Ramayan, are making their electoral debuts. The BJP has removed Varun Gandhi from its list of candidates for Uttar Pradesh, but his mother Maneka Gandhi has managed to hold onto Sultanpur. Former Union minister Anant Kumar Hegde was removed by the BJP from the Uttara Kannada seat, and Union minister Ashwini Choubey was removed from the Buxar seat. Sita Soren, a new candidate from Dumka, will compete.
Kurukshetra, Haryana, native Naveen Jindal, who left the Congress on Sunday and joined the BJP, has been nominated. Notably absent from the list was General VK Singh (retd), who declared his resignation from political office just hours prior to the release of the fifth list.
There has been no announcement on embattled MP Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, the former chief of the Wrestling Federation of India.
Kangana Ranaut expressed her excitement at being formally invited to the party after her identity was revealed from Mandi. “Today, the national leadership of the Bharatiya Janta party (BJP) announced me as their Loksabha candidate from my birthplace of Himachal Pradesh, Mandi (constituency). I abide by the high command’s decision to contest the Loksabha elections,” said the man who is my beloved Bharat and the leader of Bhartiya Janta’s own party. It is an honor and a joy for me to formally join the party. I want to be a trustworthy public servant and a deserving karyakarta,” Kangana Ranaut wrote on X.
Nityanand Rai from Ujiarpur, Giriraj Singh from Begusarai, Patna Sahib’s Ravi Shankar Prasad, Jagadish Shettar from Belagaum, K Sudhakaran from Chikkaballapur, Dharmendra Pradhan from Sambalpur, Pratap Sarangi from Balasore, Puri’s Sambit Patra, Aparajita Sarangi from Bhubaneshwar, Jitin Prasada from Pilibhit, Raju Bista from Darjeeling, Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay from Tamluk, and Dilip Ghosh from Bardhaman-Durgapur are among the other notable mentions from the fifth list.
