NEW DELHI, January 17: Home Minister Indrajit Gupta and Agriculture Minister Chaturanan Mishra figure in the first list of Lok Sabha candidates released by the Communist Party of India today.Among the 15 candidates in the list, nine were members of the just-dissolved eleventh Lok Sabha and four others were members of the 10th Lok Sabha. Gupta has been renominated from Midnapore in West Bengal. The Agriculture Minister will contest again from Madhubani in Bihar, despite protests from a section of the party which wanted Bhogendra Jha, who held the seat before Mishra was fielded there in the last election.
Geeta Mukherjee (Panskura, West Bengal), the party's main lobbyist for the women's reservation bill, is the only woman candidate in this list.The CPI has renominated sitting MP Ramashray Prasad Singh from Bihar's Jehanabad, accepting Left ally CPI (ML)'s challenge of a ``friendly contest'' for that seat. The CPI (ML) nominee there had polled only 1.30 lakh votes compared to CPI's 2.81 lakh in the last
elections, but the CPI (ML) maintains that this time it is in a winning position.
The CPI has also named candidates for Buxar, Nalanda and Hazaribagh, the other seats which the CPI (ML) too would prefer to have left for its own candidates.
Today's list covers eight seats in Bihar, three each in Kerala and West Bengal and one in Assam.
Meanwhile, the CPI has taken exception to Sonia Gandhi's Hyderabad speech which focused on the demolition of Babri Masjid. The party found it significant that she did not raise the ``emotional'' issue during her rallies in Sriperumbudur and Bangalore, but in Hyderabad which has a sizeable Muslim population.
CPI's national secretary Atul Kumar Anjan was sceptical about her remark that Rajiv Gandhi had said a month before his death that he would stand in front of the Babri Masjid if there was any attempt to demolish it. ``Why is she making this revelation now?'' he wanted to know.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
