The Bharatiya Janata Party’s central election committee met for the third time in last five days to pick its candidates for the April-May Lok Sabha elections, but stopped short of announcing their names.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, BJP Chief Amit Shah, Home Minister Rajnath Singh, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and other senior leaders of the party sat for over four hours to discuss the names of possible candidates in Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal.

“We discussed candidates for about 40 seats of western Uttar Pradesh and others, which will go to poll in the initial phases,” a BJP leader privy to the deliberations said.

“We finalised candidates for 27 out of 42 Lok Sabha seats of West Bengal,” second BJP leader said. Union minister Babul Supriyo’s name was cleared from Asansol, a seat he won in 2014. Those who joined the BJP in recent past, such as Khagen Das of CPM and Arjun Singh of Trinamool Congress, will also get BJP ticket to contest the parliamentary election. A decision on Darjeeling, a seat represented by union minister S S Ahluwalia, will be taken later. A decision on six seats of Chhattisgarh was also taken at today’s meeting.

Another meeting of the BJP’s election committee has been called on March 22 to discuss the pending names from different states and make a formal announcement.

“We want to make announcement for 250-odd candidates in the first list, so there is a delay,” another BJP leader said.

The BJP has cleared the names of its candidates for several states, such as Bihar, but has not made an announcement so far.

First Published: Mar 21, 2019 00:32 IST