Vadodara deputy mayor Ranjan Ben Bhatta is the candidate chosen by BJP to try and win the Lok Sabha seat which has been vacated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi while Congress has put up the party's city unit chief Narendra Rawat as its contestant for the Sept. 13 bypoll.
BJP has decided to go with Bhatta as its nominee for the prestigious seat although it was widely speculated that party chief Amit Shah would be fielded from Vadodara. Shah, however, has decided not to contest in view of the bigger charge entrusted to him in the organisation.
Rawat, the Vadodara Congress chief, was the first-choice candidate for the seat after clearing the much-talked about primaries exercise for selection of nominees at the time of the last general elections.
However, he had withdrawn his candidature at the time, making way for AICC general secretary Madhusudan Mistry to challenge Modi for the seat. Modi won the seat by a margin of 5.7 lakh votes while Mistry notched up a little more than 2.5 lakh votes.
Modi, who had also contested from Varanasi, decided to retain the seat representing the temple town in Uttar Pradesh, although he had won it by a lower margin of 3.37 lakh votes, beating Aam Aadmi Party's Arvind Kejriwal.
For Congress, the other names doing the rounds for the seat were those of Satyajitsinh Gaekwad and its former city unit president Suresh Patel. Gujarat Congress had sent three names -- of Rawat, Patel and Gaekwad -- as possible nominees for the bypoll of which the ticket has now gone to Rawat.
The names announced by BJP were part of the party's list of candidates for bypolls to 33 Assembly seats in the states of Assam, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Sikkim, Tripura, West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh.
BJP also announced the name of municipal corporator Suresh Patel as the candidate for the Maninagar Assembly constituency, which was represented by Modi when he was the chief minister of Gujarat.
Byelections to these seats would be held on Sept. 13 with the results to be announced on Sept. 16. The last date for filing nominations is August 27.
