Thaindian News

Ahmedabad, March 13 (IANS) The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s Gujarat unit has shortlisted about 30 nominees for the state’s 26 Lok Sabha seats and will submit the names to the party’s central parliamentary board in Delhi Saturday for finalising the candidates, party officials said here Friday.
The shortlist was finalised in a meeting of the BJP’s state parliamentary board, chaired by Chief Minister Narendra Modi, in state capital Gandhinagar Thursday.

Modi, accompanied by the BJP’s state unit president Purshottam Rupala and general secretary Bhikhu Dalsania, will attend the meeting of the central parliamentary board in New Delhi Saturday to finalise the list of candidates for Gujarat, party sources told IANS.

The shortlist, comprising about 30 names, had been prepared out of over 600 applicants for the state’s 26 Lok Sabha seats, a party MP involved in the selection process said.

The MP said that four meetings were held by the party’s parliamentary board in the past fortnight, adding there weren’t too much debate over the candidates except in case of Vadodara where the party may field TV actress Smriti Irani instead of sitting MP Jayaben Thakkar.

According to the party sources, the central parliamentary board may take little time to finalise the candidates for Gujarat, as it did before the December 2007 assembly polls when the list of candidates for the 182 seats was cleared by the board in 15 minutes flat as the shortlisting process is closely analysed by Modi himself.