The CEC of the BJP will begin at 6pm on Saturday where the names of candidates for all the 91 constituencies that fall in the first phase will be discussed . This will be followed by consecutive meetings on March 18 and March 22.
New Delhi: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is all slated to hold its first Central Election Committee (CEC) meeting, this season. CEC is the body that decides, who will get BJP ticket and from which constituency. The meeting will be chaired by PM Narendra Modi and key leaders like Amit Shah, Sushma Swaraj, Rajnath Singh are expected to be present.
The CEC will begin at 6pm on Saturday, which will be followed by consecutive meetings on March 18 and March 22.
On March 16, the names of candidates for all the 91 constituencies that fall in the first phase, will be discussed. Meanwhile, sources say, Assam chief minister Sarbananda Sonowal can be fielded in the 2019 Lok Sabha this time. The party is keen to get him back into national politics. Tezpur is a constituency that has been zeroed in for him. Sensing this, Tezpur's sitting BJP MP Ram Prasad Sharma quit the BJP. Sharma announced his decision on Facebook, first reported by MyNation.
For Bengal, candidates for Cooch Behar and Alipurduar in the north will be discussed, as both of them will go to polls in the first phase. While names of Deepak Barman for Cooch Behar has got Bengal unit's thumbs up, the Alipurduar seat is still caught in limbo. Bengal is a very crucial state for the BJP, where it hopes to gain big, so as to compensate the presumptive losses in Uttar Pradesh. BJP won 71 out of 80 seats in Uttar Pradesh in 2014.
Party sources say the three states where it lost during the recent Assembly elections in 2018 may see a lot of sitting MPs being denied tickets to Lok Sabha. The source told MyNation, "The party leadership wants to give a chance to a lot of fresh faces, mostly from the organisation in the three states of Madhya Pradesh, Chhatisgarh and Rajasthan. While leaders with a traditional turf are likely to retain their constituencies, omissions will take place based on the feedback of the leadership from its own organisational mechanism and also through the NaMo App. However, the final decision rests with the CEC."
2019 general election, which is extremely crucial for both the BJP and the opposition, will be held in seven phases.
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