With Advani’s exit, will there be an end of poll road to BJP's Murli Manohar Joshi?

New Delhi, Mar 24: With veterans such as L K Advani and B C Khanduri being dropped from their Lok Sabha seats by the BJP, it seems that the party may have decided to ease out several of its old guards from electoral politics after keeping them out of government by introducing an age bar of 75 years.

However, the fate of another party veteran, 85-year-old Murli Manohar Joshi, who had won from Kanpur in 2014, remains uncertain as the party did not announce its candidate from the seat in the first list which was released on Thursday.

If reports are to be believed, BJP said that Murli Manohar Joshi may be dropped from his Kanpur constituency and is unlikely to be fielded from from any other constituency. The party is actually planning to field a stronger candidate against former Union minister Sri Prakash Jaiswal who holds the advantage of being from the district and has also represented the seat twice consecutively from 2004-14.

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In case, if BJP plans to go with the same technique, then the party is likely to give away the ticket to Joshi due to his caste, which appears to be somewhat disenchanted with the BJP in Uttar Pradesh, where eventually the ruling party's fate might be decided.

While, in case of 77-year-old BJP leader and former Union minister Kalraj Mishra, who is presently representing the Deoria constituency in Eastern UP, the BJP is unlikely to field him again since he was inactive in his constituency according to the feedback given by the organisation to the top leadership.

However, senior leaders like Kalraj Mishra and Bhagat Singh Koshyari had already announced their unwillingness to contest the coming Lok Sabha polls.

A number of veteran leaders, including Shanta Kumar, B C Khanduri and Kariya Munda- all in their 80s- have not been fielded by the BJP in the polls, seen as part of its strategy under Modi and Shah to ease them out and groom younger leaders in their place.