Congress to name candidates for remaining 18 Lok Sabha seats in MP on Tuesday: Functionary

Bhopal: The Congress will declare its candidates for the remaining 18 Lok Sabha seats in Madhya Pradesh on Tuesday after a meeting of its Central Election Committee (CEC) which will finalise the third list of nominees for the April-May polls, a senior party functionary said on Monday.

The grand old party has left one seat, Khajuraho, bordering Uttar Pradesh, for its I.N.D.I.A. bloc partner Samajwadi Party which is yet to announce its candidate for the constituency.

Madhya Pradesh has 29 Lok Sabha seats and the BJP has nominated candidates on all of them, while the Congress has released 10 names so far in the state and 18 contestants remain to be finalised.

Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge is scheduled to chair a CEC meeting on Tuesday in New Delhi to take a final call on the remaining 18 Lok Sabha seats in Madhya Pradesh, the party's state unit media cell chief, KK Mishra, told PTI.

The screening committee has already forwarded the names of candidates to the party's poll panel, he added.

"We are sure that the party will nominate the rest of the candidates tomorrow (Tuesday) as our leader Rahul Gandhi's Bharat Nyay Yatra has concluded," Mishra added.

He rejected suggestions in some quarters that senior Congress leaders in Madhya Pradesh were shying away from contesting the upcoming Lok Sabha polls due to the party's poor showing in the assembly elections held in November last year.

Mishra alleged the BJP was behind creation of such a perception of the Congress.

"There is no dearth of leaders in the Madhya Pradesh Congress. These are accusations of the BJP which itself has run out of leaders. And that is why they are buying our leaders," he alleged.

According to another senior leader of the Congress, the party is likely to give tickets to three to four women candidates.

No woman was named in the list of 10 candidates announced for the state by the Congress last week.

The Congress has so far released two list of candidates, containing a total of 82 names, for different states.

Meanwhile, the Samajwadi Party (SP) said it will name its candidate for the Khajuraho Lok Sabha seat, where voting will take place on April 26, this week.

"We are going to nominate our candidate for Khajuraho in the next three to four days," SP national spokesman Yash Bhartiya said.

Madhya Pradesh will vote in four phases between April 19 and May 13.

In the 2019 general elections, the BJP won 28 of the 29 seats in the state with the Congress managing to bag just Chhindwara, the home turf of party veteran Kamal Nath, whose son Nakul emerged victorious from the constituency. Nakul Nath has been fielded again from Chhindwara.