Sunday, 16 January 2022 | PNS | Dehradun
The Congress party is expected to release its first list of candidates on Sunday for the upcoming assembly elections of Uttarakhand. To finalise the list of the candidates the central election committee (CEC) of the Congress party held a marathon virtual meeting on Saturday. The meeting was going on at the time of filing this report. The CEC is headed by the Congress president Sonia Gandhi and all the members of the Congress Working Committee (CWC) are its members. The leaders of the screening committee for Uttarakhand are also attending this meeting. The CEC is deliberating on the names of candidates sent by the screening committee for the 70 seats of Uttarakhand assembly. The screening committee after two days of deliberations had sent the panel of candidates for the CEC on Friday night. In the first phase the Congress is expected to declare the names for about 45 seats where there is no disagreement among the senior leaders of the state. As per the Congress sources the names of all the sitting MLAs and those who lost last election by slim margin can be declared any time. In some seats there is disagreement among the camps headed by former chief minister and head of election campaign committee Harish Rawat and leader of opposition (LoP) Pritam Singh. Apart from these seats there are some seats where the Congress could declare its candidates after release of BJP list. In the screening committee the issue of one ticket for one family was also discussed. If the party accepts this then it could cause problems for senior leader Yashpal Arya who is demanding a ticket for himself from Bajpur and his son Sanjeev Arya from Nainital assembly constituency. Harish Rawat too is learnt to be favoring tickets for his son Anand and daughter Anupma.
