Congress releases sixth list of 22 candidates for Rajasthan assembly polls, denies ticket to minister Mahesh Joshi

PTI, Nov 5, 2023, 8:22 AM IST

New Delhi: The Congress on Saturday named 22 more candidates for the Rajasthan assembly polls and denied ticket to Public Health Engineering Department Minister Mahesh Joshi from his Hawa Mahal constituency in Jaipur.

The party fielded its Jaipur city unit president R R Tiwari in place of Joshi.

With this, the Congress has so far announced its candidates on 178 seats, out of a total of 200, while leaving one seat – Bharatpur – for the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD).

Joshi, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Shanti Dhariwal and Rajasthan Tourism Development Corporation (RTDC) chairman Dharmendra Rathore were served notices by the party for indiscipline after Congress MLAs of the Ashok Gehlot camp skipped a Congress Legislature Party meeting called at the chief minister’s residence in Jaipur in September last year and held a parallel meeting at Dhariwal’s residence to oppose any move of the party to appoint Sachin Pilot as the chief minister.

Gehlot was in the race for the Congress president post at that time.

In its latest list of 22 candidates, the party named Abhimanyu Poonia from Sangaria, Shahjad Khan from Soorsagar, Om Narayaniwal from Bhilwara, and Naimuddin Guddu from Ladpura.

The 200-member Rajasthan Assembly will go to polls on November 25 and the counting of votes will be taken up on December 3.