Adil Ranjan Chaudhry wants Varun Gandhi to join Congress after BJP rejects ticket

Murshidabad (West Bengal):

After the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) decided not to field sitting MP Varun Gandhi from Pilibhit in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections, Congress MP Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury paid tribute to the leader People proposed to join the party and asked him to join the party.

Addressing the media here on Tuesday, the senior Congress leader said Varun Gandhi was denied a ticket from the BJP due to his association with the Gandhi family.

“He should come here. We will be happy. He is an educated man. He has a clean image. The BJP refused him a ticket because of his association with the Gandhi family. I think he should come (to the Congress) ,” Congress leaders said.

The Bharatiya Janata Party on Sunday announced its fifth list of 111 candidates for the Lok Sabha elections, in which Varun Gandhi was dropped from the Pilibhit Lok Sabha constituency and his mother Maneka Gandhi was retained from the Sultanpur constituency.

Uttar Pradesh minister Jitin Prasada, who switched to the BJP from the Congress two years ago, has been named as the BJP candidate from the Pilibhit Lok Sabha constituency.

Varun Gandhi won decisively from Pilibhit in his first election in 2009 with 4.19 lakh votes. His subsequent victories in 2014 and 2019 further cemented the family’s political dominance.

Prasada served twice as a minister in the Congress governments led by Manmohan Singh and was considered one of Rahul Gandhi’s top aides when he was defeated twice, in 2014 and 2019 Lok Sabha elections and was elected as a member of the Awami League Legislative Council in 2021.

Uttar Pradesh has sent up to 80 MPs to the Assembly, which will vote in all seven phases.

Voting for the first and second phases will be held on April 19 and April 26. Next, the state will conduct voting in the third and fourth phases again on May 7 and May 13.

Voters in Uttar Pradesh will also vote in the fifth, sixth and seventh phases on May 20, May 23 and June 1 respectively. The election results will be announced on June 4.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)