LS polls: Congress fields Kanhaiya Kumar from North East Delhi, Channi from Jalandhar

With an eye on Purvanchali voters, Congress on Sunday (April 14) fielded Kanhaiya Kumar from North East Delhi as the INDIA (Congress-AAP) joint candidate against the BJP’s incumbent MP Manoj Tiwari as the party announced 10 more candidates for the Lok Sabha elections.

Kanhaiya is currently in-charge of the National Students’ Union of India (NSUI), the student wing of the Congress, and is a former president of JNU Students’ Union.

Party veteran JP Agarwal has been fielded from the Chandni Chowk seat against the BJP's Praveen Khandelwal. The 79-year-old Agarwal has been elected thrice to the Lok Sabha from Chandni Chowk, the last time in 1996, following which he was elected to the Rajya Sabha once and then to the Lok Sabha from the North East Delhi constituency in 2009.

Udit Raj, former BJP MP and now Congress’s Dalit face in Delhi has been fielded from the North West Delhi seat.

In Punjab, former Chief Minister Charanjit Singh Channi will contest from the Jalandhar constituency while incumbent MPs Gurjeet Aujla and Amar Singh have been re-nominated as candidates from Amritsar and Fatehgarh Sahib, respectively.

Former AAP MP Dharamvir Gandhi, who had joined the Congress earlier this month, will contest the Patiala seat from which he had defeated former Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh’s wife Preneet Kaur in 2014. Preneet, the titular Maharani of Patiala, had recently joined the BJP.

Sukhpal Khaira, chief of the All India Kisan Congress, will be the party nominee from the Sangrur Lok Sabha seat while former Akali Dal veteran Jeet Mohinder Singh Sidhu, who had joined the Congress last October, will contest against Shiromani Akali Dal's Harsimrat Kaur Badal from the Badal family stronghold of Bhatinda.

Ujjwal Raman Singh, son of SP co-founder Rewati Raman Singh, will contest as the INDIA (Congress-SP) joint candidate from Uttar Pradesh’s Allahabad constituency.

Ujjwal had recently joined the Congress after the party was given the Allahabad seat to contest as part of the seat-sharing agreement with the SP. The Congress had last won the Allahabad seat in 1984, with Amitabh Bachchan as its candidate.

It lost the seat in 1988 after Bachchan resigned as MP and quit politics in the aftermath of the Bofors scandal and VP Singh rebelled against Rajiv Gandhi and the Congress to contest as an independent candidate from Allahabad. Rewati Raman Singh had won the Allahabad Lok Sabha seat as the SP candidate in 2004, defeating BJP stalwart Murli Manohar Joshi, and again in the 2009 general elections while Ujjwal has been a former two-term MLA from the Karachana Assembly segment of Allahabad Lok Sabha.

With the announcement of Ujjwal’s candidature, the Congress has now declared candidates for 15 of the 17 Lok Sabha seats it will contest as the SP's junior ally in Uttar Pradesh. The party is likely to announce its candidates for the high profile Amethi and Rae Bareli seats only after April 26.

Sources say the Congress may finally field Rahul Gandhi from Amethi, which he had lost to the BJP's Smriti Irani in 2019, but a formal announcement is being deferred till voting for the Wayanad seat, which Rahul currently represents and is seeking re-election from, concludes on April 26.

Priyanka Gandhi Vadra is tipped to take over from her mother Sonia Gandhi, who has opted out of electoral politics and is now a Rajya Sabha MP from Rajasthan, as the Congress candidate in Rae Bareli. In 2019, Rae Bareli was the lone seat that the Congress had won in UP.