New Delhi: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Sunday corrected its first list of 195 candidates for the upcoming Lok Sabha elections after it made a major mistake in the state of Assam. The party had announced its candidates for 11 out of 14 Lok Sabha seats in Assam on Saturday, without taking into account the changes in the parliamentary constituencies due to the delimitation exercise conducted by the Election Commission of India (ECI) last year.
The party admitted its error and released a revised list of candidates for Assam on Sunday, with a tweet saying, ‘The number and names of parliamentary constituencies have been corrected in the list of candidates for the state of Assam.’
Changes in the revised list
According to the revised list, the party has made the following changes in its candidates for Assam:
- Dilip Saikia will contest from Mangaldoi (earlier announced as Darrang Udalgiri), which comprises the districts of Darrang and Udalguri.
- Amar Singh Tiso will contest from the Autonomous District (earlier announced as Diphu), which covers the districts of Dima Hasao and Karbi Anglong.
- Ranjit Dutta will contest from Nowgong (earlier announced as Tezpur), which includes the districts of Nagaon and Sonitpur.
- Suresh Bora will contest from Kaliabor (earlier announced as Nagaon), which covers parts of Nagaon, Golaghat, and Karbi Anglong districts.
- Kamakhya Prasad Tasa will contest from Jorhat (earlier announced as Kaziranga), which comprises parts of Jorhat, Sivasagar, and Charaideo districts.
Some of these seats, such as Mangaldoi and Kaliabor, were wrongly mentioned as non-existent Lok Sabha constituencies in the first list, and the names of the candidates were also mismatched with the seats.
Alliance with regional parties
The party has also allotted two seats to its old ally Assam Gana Parishad (AGP), and one seat to United People’s Party Liberal (UPPL), a new partner from the Bodoland Territorial Region (BTR). The AGP will contest from Barpeta and Dhubri, while the UPPL will contest from Kokrajhar.
The party has also replaced its sitting MP from Dibrugarh, Rameshwar Teli, with Union Minister Sarbananda Sonowal, who is currently the Chief Minister of Assam. Sonowal had earlier represented Dibrugarh in the Lok Sabha from 2004 to 2009.
First elections after delimitation
The Lok Sabha elections in Assam will be the first after the delimitation exercise, which was carried out by the ECI in 2020, to redraw the boundaries of the parliamentary and assembly constituencies based on the 2011 census. The exercise resulted in the creation of two new Lok Sabha seats, Biswanath and Gauhati West, and the abolition of two existing seats, Guwahati and Lakhimpur. The number of Lok Sabha seats in Assam remained unchanged at 14.
The delimitation exercise also affected the composition of the assembly segments under each Lok Sabha seat, and the number of reserved seats for the Scheduled Castes (SCs) and the Scheduled Tribes (STs). The number of SC reserved seats increased from two to three, while the number of ST reserved seats decreased from 10 to eight.
The Lok Sabha elections in Assam will be held in three phases, on April 11, 18 and 23. The results will be declared on May 23.
