BJP sprinkles star-dust on election campaign
OUR BUREAU
NEW DELHI, January 22: The Bharatiya Janata Party is making the contest glitzy by the day with the induction of cine actors and actresses. On Thursday, Hindi film star Vinod Khana and Telugu actress K Jayasri were not only inducted but were given tickets to contest the Lok Sabha polls.Khanna was given ticket from Gurudaspur constituency in Punjab, BJP president L K Advani announced. Jayasri will be contesting the Kakinada constituency, the area which gave tumultuous welcome to Advani, when he visited it during his last `rathyatra'. To sharpen its campaign plank, the party also demanded the release of the special investigation team report on Bofors scandal. Advani also released a one-minute theme song of the party's campaign in which it projected Atal Behari Vajpayee as its prime ministerial candidate. The video song titled `man mein vishwas Atal ho' combined the personality of Vajpayee with the BJP philosophy. Party general secretary Pramod Mahajan said the song was part ofthe multi-media strategy to
be adopted by the party during the campaigning.Gurudaspur is not a stronghold of the BJP, but it had been given seats by Akali Dal as per adjustment. It had been a Congress stronghold but the BJP hopes to make the contest tough for the Congress nominee Sukhbans Kaur and even expects some miracle to happen with the charisma of Khanna. That the party considers every seat important is also testified by the selection of Ila Pant, wife of Congress leader K C Pant as its candidate from Nainital. Ila Pant had joined the party in 1991 but had deserted it in a week. It had cost dearly to UP Congress leader N D Tiwari. Tiwari later attributed his defeat to this phenomenon, which he had termed a conspiracy by Pant and other Congress leaders, particularly P V Narasimha Rao. With this, the BJP had released names of 339 candidates so far.Party general secretary M Venkaiah Naidu said that the BJP had failed to reach an agreement with Telugu Desam (NTR) of Lakshmi Parvathi and had decided to put its candidates from all
the 42 seats in Andhra Pradesh. Today, the party released 17 more names from Andhra Pradesh.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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