Arif Mohammad Khan in BJP list

Senior Bharatiya Janata Party leaders and former Union ministers Dhananjay Kumar and S B P K Satyanaryanan Rao were dropped while new entrants Arif Mohammad Khan and Satpal Malik figured in the third list of 52 candidates finalised by the party on Sunday for the coming Lok Sabha elections.

Dhananjay Kumar had been elected from Mangalore five times while Satyanarayan Rao represented Rajamundri in Andhra Pradesh in the dissolved Lok Sabha.

Arif Mohammad Khan has been fielded from Kaisergunj and Malik from Baghpat (both in Uttar Pradesh). UP assembly Speaker Kesarinath Tripathi will be the candidate from Machhilishahar.

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Vajpayee's niece Karuna Shukla will contest from Janjgir in Chhattisgarh and is among the four women candidates who figure in the list. The other three women are Manorama Madhav Raj from Udupi in Karnataka, Sarita Bhadoria from Etawah in Uttar Pradesh and Rupali Dilip Patill Nilangkar from Latur in Maharasthra, which was represented in the dissolved Lok Sabha by former Lok Sabha speaker and Deputy Leader of the Congress Shivraj V Patil.

Of the five Lok Sabha seats in Andhra Pradesh, Union ministers will be fielded in three - Bandaru Dattatreya (Secunderabad), U V Krishnam Raju (Narsapur) and C H Vidyasagar Rao (Karimnagar).

With this, the party's Central Election Committee, which met in Delhi on Sunday morning at the residence of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, has cleared names of 288 of the 350 candidates it will be fielding in the elections.

The meeting also finalised 125 candidates for the assembly polls in Karnataka where the party is seeking to form a government for the first time. Among them are 27 sitting MLAs and five women candidates.

Briefing reporters after the meeting, party general secretary Pramod Mahajan said Karnataka state unit president Ananth Kumar would be contesting from Bangalore South while no one is being projected as the chief ministerial candidate.

Former state party president B S Yediyurappa is being fielded from the Shikaripur assembly seat. Leader of the Opposition in the Karnataka assembly Jagdish Shettar has been renominated from Hubli Rural, which he represented in the dissolved house.