Lok Sabha elections 2019: Congress’s Milind Deora, Priya Dutt to contest from Mumbai

Former Maharashtra chief minister Sushilkumar Shinde, and city Congress leaders Milind Deora and Priya Dutt are among the first candidates announced by the Congress for the state.

Five candidates from Maharashtra figured in a list released by the All-India Congress Committee on Wednesday.

Shinde will contest from Solapur, his Lok Sabha constituency. Deora was renominated from Mumbai south, while Dutt will contest the Mumbai north-central constituency. Dutt had earlier expressed unwillingness to contest, but was asked by the party leadership to fight the polls. She will challenge Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) member of Parliament, Poonam Mahajan.

The Congress has named Nana Patole from Nagpur, to take on Union transport minister Nitin Gadkari. In 2014, Patole was elected from Bhandra-Gondia as a BJP candidate, but quit the party last year protesting the Centre’s “anti-farmer policies”.

Namdev Usendi is the party’s Gadchiroli-Chimur candidate. Except Patole, all other candidates had contested the 2014 elections on a Congress ticket.

A second list of at least seven more candidates from Maharashtra is expected to be released in next few days. The Central Election Committee, headed by Congress president Rahul Gandhi, will meet again on Saturday to finalise the remaining candidates from the state.

Meanwhile, the working committee of the state Congress is meeting on Thursday morning to finalise seat-sharing deals with smaller allies. A meeting of senior Congress and Nationalist Congress Party leaders is expected to take place later, to decide the formal announcement of the Opposition coalition in the state.