New Delhi : (23/03/2019) The party that is currently ruling the country has shared a list of 184 candidates for parliamentary constituencies from 23 states, of which only 22 candidates are women, including big names like Hema Malini and Smriti Irani. Women form only about 11% of the total list of candidates released as of now by the BJP.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will again contest from Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh along with BJP President Amit Shah, who will be contesting his first Lok Sabha election replacing LK Advani as candidate from Gandhinagar.
The highest number of women candidates fielded by BJP are in West Bengal which is a total number of four women—Deboshree Chaudhary from Raiganj, Sreerupa Mitra Choudhary from Maldaha Dakshin, Locket Chatterjee from Hooghly and Bharati Ghosh from Ghatal.
Next in line are UP and Maharashtra with three women candidates each. Sitting MP Hema Malini is contesting again from Mathura, Smriti Irani is also contesting again from Amethi and Sangh Mitra Maurya is contesting from Badaun in UP.
From Maharashtra, Dr Heena Vijaykumar Gavit is contesting from Nandurbar (ST), Raksha Nikhil Khadse from Raver and Poonam Mahajan from Mumbai-North-Central.
Besides edging out the veterans, the other takeaway from BJP’s announcement of its first list of candidates that contained the names of 182 candidates across Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Jammu and Kashmir, Jharkhand, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, West Bengal, Sikkim and Rajasthan.
