Gujarat Assembly Election 2022: BJP releases list of 40-star campaigners, PM Modi and JP Nadda top in list

New Delhi, Nov 11: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has released its list of star campaigners for the Gujarat Assembly Election. The first name in this list is that of Prime Minister Narendra Modi followed by other senior leaders.

Union ministers Amit Shah, Rajnath Singh and Nitin Gadkari, chief ministers Bhupendra Patel (Gujarat), Yogi Adityanath (Uttar Pradesh), Himanta Biswa Sarma (Assam) and Shivraj Singh Chouhan (Madhya Pradesh), and the party's national president J P Nadda are also included in the list.

Former Gujarat chief minister Vijay Rupani and former deputy chief minister Nitin Patel, who have not been fielded as candidates by the BJP in the assembly polls, are on the list of the party's star campaigners.

The lists, submitted to the Election Commission, also includes many other Union ministers and state party leaders. With the EC capping the expenditure by candidates during the campaign, rules allow the expenses incurred on the stump by these star campaigners to be borne by their party and not the local contestants. The BJP had on Thursday released its first list of 160 candidates for the two-phase elections to the 182-member Gujarat Assembly.

The party has claimed that a number of senior leaders from the state, including Rupani and Patel, have opted out of the contest and had written to the central leadership to this effect.

Gujarat will vote in two phases on December 1 and 5 and the votes will be counted on December 8.