BJP announces candidates for council seats in Bihar, UP

Bihar Deputy Chief Minister Sushil Kumar Modi is among the 13 candidates the BJP today announced for Bihar and Uttar Pradesh legislative council seats with an eye on social equations aimed at consolidating its votes.

Among the 10 candidates for UP seats are Bukkal Nawab, Yashwant Singh and Jaiveer Singh, who had left rival parties to join the BJP after its win in the Assembly polls, besides Mohsin Raja, the lone Muslim minister in the UP government, the party said in a statement.

Bukkal Nawab is another Muslim candidate in the list.

In Bihar, two other candidates are Mangal Pandey, a minister in the Nitish Kumar government, and Sanjay Paswan, a former Union minister who hails from an influential Dalit community.

The candidature of Paswan, who was kept out of any important responsibility within the organisation for several years, underlines the saffron party's renewed vigour to win over Dalits in a state where they will be key in the direct fight between the BJP-JD(U) combine and the RJD-Congress alliance.

Other candidates for the UP polls are Mahendra Singh, Sarojini Agarwal, Vidya Sagar Sonkar, Vijay Bahadur Pathak, Ashok Kataria and Ashok Dhawan.

The MLCs will be elected by MLAs and BJP sources said all their candidates are likely to emerge victorious.