Rahul Gandhi’s Wayanad candidacy is confirmed by the Congress’s first list of 39 candidates

Rahul Gandhi, the former president of the party, is one of 39 candidates nominated by the main opposition Congress on Friday, almost a week after the governing BJP announced 195 candidates for the forthcoming General Election. Gandhi won Wayanad for the first time in 2019 and is a previous party president.

Top Congressmen Bhupesh Baghel from Rajnandgaon, Tamradhwaj Sahu (74), from Mahasamund, and DK Suresh, the brother of Karnataka Deputy Chief Minister DK Shivakumar, from Bangalore (Rural), whom he has been representing in the Lok Sabha (LS) for the last two terms, are among those on the list.

The closest Rahul ally, KC Venugopal, the current Rajya Sabha MP and AICC general secretary, has been nominated by the Congress in a significant step. Alappuzha is the only seat in Kerala that the CPM won out of 20 in 2019. The Congress alone won 15 seats, the most LS share it has ever received in India, while the remaining 19 seats went to the Congress-led UDF.

Both K Sudhakaran, the head of the Kerala Congress committee and Kannur-based member of the Lok Sabha, and Thiruvananthapuram MP Shashi Tharoor, who has served three terms, will stand for election.

There are two fascinating races in Kerala. In Wayanad, Rahul Gandhi is facing Annie Raja, the wife of CPI general secretary D Raja. In Thiruvananthapuram, MoS IT and Electronics Rajeev Chandrashekhar is running against Shashi Tharoor. The party’s Central Election Committee met here Wednesday to finalize the 39 names after debating 60 candidates for 11 states and reaching an agreement on only 39 of them.

The Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge’s previous LS seat in Gulbarga, Karnataka, is still under uncertainty. There is talk that his son-in-law Radhakrishna Doddamani may get the ticket. Venugopal and Ajay Maken, the treasurer of the All India Congress Committee, released the list, which includes six constituencies (out of eleven) in Chhattisgarh, seven out of 28 in Karnataka, fifteen out of twenty in Kerala, one Lakshadweep constituency, both Meghalaya constituencies, the sole Nagaland constituency, the sole Sikkim Lok Sabha seat, four out of seventeen Telangana constituencies, and one out of the two Tripura constituencies.

Venugopal informed reporters that 24 of the 39 candidates named today were members of minority, SC, ST, and OBC groups. Twelve were under fifty, eight were between fifty and sixty, twelve were between sixty and seventy-six, and seven were between seventy-one and seventy-six.

Former Chhattisgarh minister Tamradhwaj Sahu (74), who received a ticket from Mahasamund, is among the list’s most elderly contenders. Jyotsna Mahant, a resident of Korba, Chhattisgarh, is the wife of former Union Minister Charan Das Mahant, who is standing for the Congress.

Regarding alliances with other INDIA bloc members, Venugopal said that the Congress took the matter of alliances seriously. To negotiate seat-sharing, he said, the other parties should work together as well. “We want to see fewer BJP Members of Parliament,” he said.

When asked whether Rahul will just run from Wayanad and not from Amethi in Uttar Pradesh, he remained mute.

The failure of the Congress to secure a seat-sharing agreement with the Trinamool Congress in Meghalaya is shown by the fact that on Friday it declared a candidate for the Tura seat in the state, in addition to Shillong, where it re-nominated its current Member of Parliament, Vincent Pala. With backing from the Garo hills, the Trinamool Congress sought to fight with the Congress from Tura.