The Aam Aadmi Party on Tuesday released its second list of candidates for the upcoming Delhi Assembly elections, early next year. Manish Sisodia, the sitting MLA from Patparganj, will contest from Jangpura, while new entrant Avadh Ojha is pitted from Sisodia’s home constituency.
Sisodia won the Patparganj seat for the first time in December 2013 Assembly elections. He defeated BJP’s Nakul Bhardwaj to secure the seat. In the February 2015 elections, he held the position again by defeating BJP’s Vinod Kumar Binny and has again won the seat in the 2020 elections against BJP’s Ravinder Singh Negi.
The new list of candidates shows 18 fresh faces for the 20 seats, including Avadh Ojha, a well-known UPSC mentor and teacher who joined the AAP earlier this month. Ojha, hailing from Gonda in Uttar Pradesh, has been given the ticket from Patparganj based on changing electoral demographics of the constituency with particular targeting of Purvanchali votes which amount to around 42 percent in Delhi.
This community wields considerable influence in close to half of Delhi’s 70 Assembly constituencies, especially in constituencies such as Burari, Laxmi Nagar, and Dwarka. The Purvanchal region comprises the eastern part of Uttar Pradesh and the western part of Bihar.
Other names in the list are Mukesh Goel – a sitting councillor and AAP strategist for the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, will contest from Adarsh Nagar; Punardeep Singh Sawhney, son of sitting MLA Parlad Singh Sawhney, will be the candidate from Chandni Chowk.
The list also includes Jintender Singh Shunty, who has replaced sitting MLA and Speaker Ram Niwas Goel in Shahdara and Surinder Pal Singh Bittu, who takes over from AAP’s chief whip Dilip Pandey in Timarpur after recently switching from the BJP.
This list comes after the party’s first list of 11 candidates, which included six leaders who joined AAP from the BJP and Congress. Former BJP leaders Brahm Singh Tanwar, Anil Jha, and BB Tyagi, and ex-Congress leaders Chaudhry Zubair Ahmad, Veer Dhingan, and Sumesh Shokeen have also been given tickets for the polls. The elections to the 70-member Delhi Assembly are likely to be held in January 2025.
