Preneet Kaur, Taranjit Sandhu, Ravneet Bittu, Hans Raj Hans BJP’s Punjab picks for Lok Sabha election

Aditi Tandon

New Delhi, March 30

The BJP on Saturday declared the eighth list of 11 Lok Sabha candidates, naming six out of 13 candidates in Punjab.

The party has fielded sitting MPs Preneet Kaur from Patiala, Ravneet Singh Bittu from Ludhiana and Sushil Kumar Rinku from Jalandhar (reserved) seat.

All three joined the party in the recent days. While Preneet, a four-term MP, and Bittu, a three-term MP, defected from the Congress, Rinku switched over from AAP.

Former Indian ambassador to the US Taranjit Singh Sandhu has been named as the candidate from Amritsar, where the party has not won since 2014.

From the Faridkot (reserved) segment, the BJP sprung a surprise by fielding Hans Raj Hans, North West Delhi MP in the outgoing 17th Lok Sabha. The Punjabi singer has been shifted from Delhi to Punjab. The BJP was struggling to find a candidate in Faridkot as is also the case with Khadoor Sahib and Fatehgarh Sahib.

Former Sujanpur MLA Dinesh Babbu has been fielded from Gurdaspur, where the party has dropped sitting MP Sunny Deol, who was seen as distant and non-performing.

Deol and Som Prakash (Hoshiarpur) are the only two sitting MPs from Punjab in the 17th Lok Sabha. Rinku had won the Jalandhar LS bypoll in 2023 on the AAP ticket and joined the BJP this week along with MLA Sheetal Angural. Other LS candidates named by the party include six-term MP from Odisha’s Cuttack Bhartruhari Mahtab, who, too, defected to the saffron fold from the BJD. Mahtab is a BJD founder member. Importantly, of the 11 candidates named today, four defected to the BJP over 16 days, starting with Preneet on March 14, Bittu on March 26, Rinku on March 27 and Mahtab on March 28.