Lok Sabha polls: BJP drops 11 ministers, fields 10 former Rajya Sabha MPs

A third of the Bharatiya Janata party (BJP)’s 303 members of Parliament are not contesting the 2024 Lok Sabha Elections. They include 11 ministers, or 15.27 per cent, of the 72-member Union Council of Ministers led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The BJP has also fielded 10 Union ministers in these polls who either completed their Rajya Sabha tenures in the first week of April or still are Upper House MPs. They are Piyush Goyal (Mumbai North), Jyotiraditya Scindia (Guna), Dharmendra Pradhan (Sambalpur), V Muraleedharan (Attingal), Bhupender Yadav (Alwar), Parshottam Rupala (Rajkot), Mansukh Mandaviya (Porbandar), Rajeev Chandrasekhar (Thiruvananthapuram), Sarbananda Sonowal (Dibrugarh), and L Murugan (Nilgiris).

Out of Lok Sabha race

Union ministers	Constituency from which they were elected in 2019
V K Singh	Ghaziabad (UP)
Darshana Jardosh	Surat (Gujarat)
Meenakshi Lekhi	New Delhi (Delhi)
Pratima Bhaumik	Tripura West (Tripura)
Rajkumar Ranjan Singh	Inner Manipur (Manipur)
John Barla	Alipurduar (West Bengal)
M Munjapara	Surendranagar (Gujarat)
Bishweswar Tudu	Mayurbhanj (Odisha)
Remeswar Teli	Dibrugarh (Assam)
A Narayanaswamy	Chitradurga (Karnataka)
Ashwini Choubey	Buxar (Bihar)

*The BJP is yet to announce its candidates for Punjab, including the candidature of Minister of State in the Ministry of Commerce and Industry Som Prakash, who represented Hoshiarpur in 2019

*Union Minister of Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises Narayan Rane's Rajya Sabha membership ended on April 3, and he is in contention to contest the Lok Sabha polls from Maharashtra