New Delhi: The Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) first list of candidates for the upcoming Delhi Assembly elections on February 8 did not have any Muslim candidates. The party will declare its second list at a later date.
The BJP had not fielded any Muslim candidate during the 2015 Delhi Assembly elections as well.
The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), in its list released earlier this week, has fielded four Muslim candidates.
The BJP list, which was released by Delhi party chief Manoj Tiwari, includes former AAP MLA Kapil Mishra and has 11 Scheduled Caste (SC) faces and four women candidates. The party also named sitting MLA Vijender Gupta and former mayors Ravinder Gupta and Yogender Chandolia.
The BJP, however, did not name its candidate against AAP leader and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, with Tiwari saying the candidate from the New Delhi seat will be announced soon.
Tiwari was joined by senior BJP leader Prakash Javadekar at the press conference where he announced the party candidates whose names were finalised at its Central Election Committee (CEC) meeting on Thursday night.
Interestingly, there is no Muslim minister in India’s 15 states — Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Goa, Gujarat, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Odisha, Sikkim, Tripura and Uttarakhand — out of the 28.
Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress government in West Bengal has the maximum number of Muslim ministers, seven, of any state — Firhad Hakim, Javed Ahmed Khan, Abdur Razzak Molla, Giasuddin Molla, Jakir Hossain, Gulam Rabbani and Siddiqullah Chowdhury.
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