11 sitting MLAs in Congress’s 1st list for Uttarakhand polls

DEHRADUN: Congress released its first list of 53 out of 70 candidates for Uttarakhand late on Saturday night. The party aimed to strike a balance between experienced contenders and new faces, while giving some important seats to defectors from BJP. Meanwhile, the party did not disclose the seat from where former CM Harish Rawat will contest and if former forest minister Harak Singh Rawat, who was re-inducted into Congress after being expelled from BJP, and his daughter-in-law Anukriti Gusain, will get a ticket.

All the sitting MLAs of the party - Manoj Rawat from Kedarnath, Pritam Singh from Chakrata, Mamta Rakesh from Bhagwanpur, Furkan Ahmed from Piran Kaliyar, Qazi Nizamudin from Mangalaur, Harish Dhami from Dharchula, Adesh Singh Chauhan from Jaspur, Karan Mahra from Ranikhet and Govind Kunjwal from Jageshwar – have been repeated by the Congress.

In a break from the “one family, one ticket” rule,

Yashpal Arya

and son

Sanjiv Arya

, both of whom left BJP to join Congress recently, got tickets to contest from Bajpur and Nainital respectively. In 2017, the father-son duo had won from these seats on BJP tickets. Mal Chand, who moved to Congress from BJP last year, has been given the

Purola

ticket. Chand had won the Purola seat in 2012 on a BJP ticket. In 2017, he was defeated by Congress’s Rajkumar. Last year, Rajkumar left Congress as Purola’s sitting MLA to join BJP. However, BJP gave the Purola ticket to Durgeshwar Lal instead.

Leader of opposition Pritam Singh will contest from Chakrata constituency, his bastion from where he has won a record five times. He is pitted against popular Bollywood singer Jubin Nautiyal’s father, Ramsharan Nautiyal. State party chief Ganesh Godiyal will contest from Srinagar (Garhwal).

Meanwhile, BJP on Sunday questioned Congress’s “ladki hoon lad sakti hoon” slogan, given the fact that the party fielded only three women in its list of 53 candidates --

Incidentally, BJP has fielded six women among the 59 names it announced for the polls earlier this week.