Haryana Assembly Elections: BJP Central Election Committee meets to discuss tickets

New Delhi: The Central Election Committee of the BJP met on Thursday evening to discuss tickets for Haryana.

Last week, the central election authority of the party convened to discuss tickets for the Jammu and Kashmir elections. Prime minister Narendra Modi convened the meeting, which saw the attendance of the party’s senior leadership including party president J P Nadda and union ministers Rajnath Singh and Amit Shah, among others.

Prior to the CEC meeting, a meeting of the party’s core committee of the Haryana state unit was held in the morning, where Chief Minister Nayab Singh Saini, former CM Manohar Lal Kattar and state president Mohan Lal Badoli were present. The meeting took place at Nadda’s house.

In the core committee meeting, some of the party’s senior leaders including Union Home Minister Amit Shah met to discuss the names of probable candidates for the upcoming Haryana assembly polls ahead of the CEC meet. Sources said that a list of names could be expected in a day or two.

Union ministers Dharmendra Pradhan, who is the BJP's in-charge for elections in Haryana was also present at the core group meeting at Nadda's residence to scrutinise the probable names from the state. Before the core committee meeting, Pradhan held a meeting with the Haryana BJP leaders at his residence.

The party is likely to focus on local issues, and to quell some of the anger due to the wrestlers’ protests, they will field some prominent sportspeople in the fray. Sources in the party also said that several of the sitting faces are likely to be dropped.

Elections to the 90-member assembly are scheduled to be held on October 1. The BJP, which has formed consecutive governments in the state for two terms, is facing anti-incumbency as well as anger against the Agniveer scheme and the wrestlers’ protests, among a host of other issues.

The party, facing incumbency, dropped Khattar in March this year and made Nayab Saini the chief minister to quell anti-incumbency ahead of the Lok Sabha elections. Despite the chance, the party could retain only 5 of the state’s 10 Lok Sabha seats; in 2019, it had won all the seats.