The BJP central election committee (CEC), which met this evening, nominated Murli Manohar Joshi (UP) and Yashwant Sinha (Jharkhand) for elections to the Upper House, rejecting a suggestion that leaders who lost their Lok Sabha seats should not be fielded immediately.

Renominations included party president Venkaiah Naidu (Karnataka), Jaswant Singh (Rajasthan) and Pramod Mahajan (Maharashtra). Former minister Dilip Singh Judeo, who hit the headlines with the cash-on-camera scam, was nominated again from Chhattisgarh.

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Hotelier Lalit Suri will contest from Orissa. Shakuntala Hegde, widow of Ramakrishna Hegde, who had backed the BJP before the LS polls, was rewarded with a ticket from Karnataka.

Former BJP vice-president Pyarelal Khandelwal has been nominated from Madhya Pradesh. Three former Lok Sabha members S Thirunavukkarasu, Jai Narain Prasad Nishad and Chhatrapal Singh have been compensated with Rajya Sabha tickets from Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and UP respectively.

Nishad had been promised a Rajya Sabha berth after the BJP surrendered his Muzaffarpur LS seat to Janata Dal (United), allowing George Fernandes to shift his constituency.

Tamil Nadu’s S Thirunavukkarasu too had been promised a Rajya Sabha seat in similar circumstances. The party had to keep him out of the fray after AIADMK leader J Jyalalithaa refused to part with his Pudukkottai seat. Chhatrapal Singh had to step aside to let Kalyan Singh contest from the Bulandshahr LS seat.

From Rajasthan, besides Jaswant Singh and Heptulla, other nominations are those of state unit president Lalit Chaturvedi. Jat Mahasabha president G P Pilania was given a ticket for the by-election caused by the death of Congress member Abrar Ahmed.

Also nominated are Narain Singh Kesari, Laxmi Narain Sharma (MP) and Rudra Narain Pani (Orissa).

At the BJP central election committee meeting today, general secretary Sanjay Joshi asked Venkaiah Naidu for his view on the nomination of defeated leaders. Naidu reportedly said there was a suggestion that defeated leaders should not be immediately fielded but no norms had been set.

But several leaders — this included Sushma Swaraj, Babulal Marandi, Arun Jaitley and Sushil Kumar Modi — objected, saying any such suggestion should be rejected. The big two, Atal Behari Vajpayee and L K Advani, nodded in agreement and this paved the way for the nomination of Joshi and Sinha.