The Congress on Tuesday announced its seventh list of candidates for the Lok Sabha polls. The list has five names — four, including two women candidates, from Chhattisgarh, and one from Tamil Nadu.
With these four — Shashi Singh from Surguja, Dr. Menka Devi Singh from Raigarh, Biresh Thakur from Kanker [all three seats reserved for the Scheduled Tribe (ST)] and Devendra Singh Yadav from Bilaspur — the party has now announced all the names from Chhattisgarh that has 11 parliamentary constituencies.
Among them, Mr. Yadav, a two-time sitting MLA from Bhilai Nagar, has been named as an accused by the Directorate of Enforcement (ED) in the alleged coal levy money laundering case, one of the major corruption allegations faced by the previous Congress government in the State. In the last year’s Assembly elections where the Congress faced a rout in the urban areas, he was the lone exception.
Dr. Menka Devi Singh, the party’s pick from Raigarh, hails from the erstwhile Sarangarh royal family. Her father Naresh Chandra Singh, the last king had held the chief ministership of undivided Madhya Pradesh for a rather brief tenure of less than a fortnight in 1969 after having been a minister for 16 years.
Its Sarguja candidate Shashi Singh also hails from a political family and carries forward the legacy of Tuleshwar Singh, a former minister in Chhattisgarh. She will take on her former party colleague Chintamani Mahraj who has been given a BJP ticket. Notably, the BJP had swept all 14 seats in Sarguja in the last Assembly polls.
Mr. Thakur from Kanker is one of the two candidates who had contested in 2019 and have been fielded again, the other being sitting MP Jyotsana Mahant, who has been retained.
From Tamil Nadu’s Mayiladuthurai Constituency, State Mahila Congress president R. Sudha has been fielded. The party has now named all its picks for the seats it will contest as a constituent of the INDIA alliance.
