BJP Revises List Of Candidates For Assam Seats, Says ‘Delimitation Taken Into Account’ – News18

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) released a revised list of candidates for Assam seats on Sunday. The saffron party made the changes after considering that the northeastern state had undergone delimitation last year, party sources said.

“The number and name of the parliamentary constituencies have been corrected in the list of candidates for Assam state,” the BJP wrote on X while sharing the new list.

The BJP on Saturday released its first list of 195 candidates for the upcoming Lok Sabha polls, days after a marathon meeting of the party’s Central Election Committee (CEC) which was chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and attended by several prominent leaders. In the first list, where the party announced to contest 11 of 14 Lok Sabha seats in Assam, the party got some of the names of the constituencies wrong.

According to the new list, Dilip Saikia will contest from Darrang Udalgiri, Amar Sing Tisso will fight the election from Diphu, Ranjit Dutta will contest from Tezpur. Suresh Bora will contest from Nagaon, and Kamakhya Prasad Tasa will contest from Kaziranga.

Some of the seats like Mangaldai and Kaliabor in Assam, which are no longer Lok Sabha constituencies, were mentioned in the previous list and candidates’ names were also mentioned next to them.

While two seats were given to Assam Gana Parishad (AGP), an old ally of the BJP, one has been allocated to United People’s Party Liberal (UPPL), the Bodoland Territorial Region’s Chief Promod Boro’s party.

For the Dibrugarh Lok Sabha seat, the BJP gave a ticket to Union Minister Sarbananda Sonowal, dropping the present MP, Rameshwar Teli.

The Lok Sabha polls will be the first election in Assam after the Election Commission of India (ECI) carried out the delimitation exercise last year.

Assam delimitation

In August 2023, the Election Commission of India (EC) on Friday published the final delimitation order for Assembly and Parliamentary constituencies in Assam, retaining the number of seats at 126 and 14, respectively. The EC had revised the names of 19 Assembly constituencies and one Parliamentary seat.

All constituencies have been delimited based on the 2001 Census as provided in Article 170 and Article 82 of the Constitution. 19 assembly and two Lok Sabha constituencies have been reserved for Scheduled Tribes (STs). One Lok Sabha and nine assembly constituencies have been reserved for Scheduled Castes (SCs). SC seats have increased to 9, from 8 while ST seats have risen to 19, from 16.