No surprise in Sena's first list

There was no major surprise in the Shiv Sena’s first list of 15 candidates for the coming Lok Sabha elections as the party did not drop any of its sitting MPs from the list nor issued tickets to any newcomer.

The list was declared today by Uddhav Thackeray, the party’s working president. The Sena is contesting 22 seats in the state. Former Union ministers Suresh Prabhu, Anant Gite and Anandrao Adsul have been given tickets from Sindhudurg-Ratnagiri, Ratnagiri-Raigad and Amravati, respectively.

Other prominent leaders who have been included in the first list are Chandrakant Khaire from Aurngabad, Bhavana Gawali from Yavatmal-Washim, Mohan Rawle from South Mumbai and Shivajirao Adhalrao-Patil from Shirur — all sitting MPs of the party.

Although former Indian cricket captain Dilip Vengsarkar and Smita Salaskar, widow of Mumbai police inspector Vijay Salaskar who succumbed to last year’s terror attacks in Mumbai, were probable candidates for the Mumbai South Central constituency, the party decided to continue with its senior MLA, Suresh Gambhir, to win back the seat from the Congress to which it lost in the 2004 Lok Sabha elections.

In the newly carved out Mumbai North-West seat, the party announced the candidature of its whip in the state assembly, Gajanan Kirtikar.

Replying to a question about the party’s support to Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar for the prime minister’s post, Thackeray clarified the party’s position by saying, “we support the person for primeministership who gives top most priority to the country’s security”.

Thackeray also denied that the seat-sharing talks between the Sena and BJP had created any bitterness between the two parties. He claimed that the seat-sharing talks had taken a long time as due to the delimitation exercise, the nature of some constituencies had changed drastically.