Breakaway Left party names five candidates

Preferring not to join mainstream Left parties, the Marxist Communist Party of India (United) on Monday announced five candidates for the Punjab assembly elections.

Preferring not to join mainstream Left parties, the Marxist Communist Party of India (United) on Monday announced five candidates for the Punjab assembly elections.

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The candidates are: Labh Singh Bhangu (Rajpura), Prem Singh Bhangu (Ghanaur), Surinder Singh Shehzad (Gill), Azad Singh Khatra (Khanna) and Hakam Singh Manana (Mohali).

The names were cleared at the party’s state committee meeting chaired by president Pawan Kumar Kaushal, MCPI (U) secretary Kuldeep Singh

said here. The party would contest nine seats. The remaining four candidates would be announced later, he said.

The MCPI (U) would extend support to candidates of other 'like-minded secular' parties, but not the Akali-BJP combine and the Congress, he added.

In 1985, Comrade Jagjit Singh Lyallpuri, along with other dissident leaders from Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Bihar, had parted ways with the CPM to form the MCPI. In 2006, the MCPI (U) was formed as a conglomerate of erstwhile leftist splinter groups.