The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) took the lead on Tuesday to announce four Lok Sabha candidates from Delhi, including three sitting MLAs, while the major partner Congress of the INDIA alliance is mulling over the candidature for the remaining three constituencies of the total of seven, which not very long ago were held all by the Congress.

Delhi Jal Board (DJB) vice chairman and MLA from Malviya Nagar, Somnath Bharti, has been named from the New Delhi parliamentary seat, currently represented by Meenakshi Lekhi from the BJP.

The AAP has nominated Mahabal Mishra, a former Congress MP, for the West Delhi seat. He unsuccessfully contested the 2014 and 2019 Lok Sabha elections against BJP’s Parvesh Verma. The 70-year-old leader had quit the Congress years ago and will be contesting the seat with a high number of Purvanchali voters.

Son of a safai karmachari, Kuldeep Kumar, sitting MLA from Kondli, will be AAP’s candidate from East Delhi. The constituency is currently represented by BJP’s Gautam Gambhir.

The AAP has fielded Tughlakabad MLA Sahi Ram Pahalwan from the South Delhi seat.

The constituency is currently represented by BJP’s Ramesh Bidhuri.

In Haryana, the AAP has fielded former Rajya Sabha MP Sushil Gupta from Kurukshetra. The AAP had already announced its three candidates for Assam and two for Gujarat.

The names were announced days after the party finalised its seat-sharing pact with the Congress for five States. The candidates’ names were declared after AAP’s Political Affairs Committee (PAC) meeting at Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal’s residence on Tuesday. The committee is the highest decision-making body of the party, headed by AAP supremo Kejriwal.

AAP national general secretary (Organisation) Sandeep Pathak announced the candidates’ names at a Press conference.

After the PAC meeting, Kejriwal released a video on ‘X’ (erstwhile Twitter) and said today the AAP has announced tickets for some Lok Sabha seats for the upcoming Lok Sabha elections.

“No party had ever fielded a candidate from the SC community on a general category seat before. The AAP does not believe in casteism. The AAP believes that everyone is equal, and if someone is capable, they can be fielded from that seat,” said Kejriwal.

AAP state unit convener Gopal Rai said the party took a historic decision in the PAC meeting today. “It has been decided to field an SC [Scheduled Caste] candidate from the East Delhi seat, which is a general category seat…Kondli MLA Kuldeep Kumar will fight…,” Rai said, adding that this may be the first time that a party has decided to field an SC candidate from East Delhi.

Speculation arose that Delhi mayor Shelly Oberoi could be fielded from New Delhi, but the party announced Malviya Nagar MLA Somnath for the constituency. There is no woman among the 10 candidates announced by AAP so far for Lok Sabha seats in Delhi, Gujarat, Assam, and Haryana.

As per the agreement between the AAP and the Congress for Delhi’s seven seats, the former will contest four: New Delhi, South Delhi, West Delhi, and East Delhi. The Congress will contest three: Chandni Chowk, Northwest Delhi, and Northeast Delhi.

The decision on candidates for Delhi seats is crucial for the AAP as the BJP had won all seven Lok Sabha seats in Delhi in the 2014 and 2019 general elections. In 2019, the BJP clinched all seven seats in the Capital in a rout for the AAP and Congress, who together secured fewer than 50 per cent of the votes polled.

Meanwhile, the Congress is considering giving a ticket to its Delhi unit president Arvinder Singh Lovely to contest the upcoming Lok Sabha polls from the Northeast Delhi constituency, party sources said on Tuesday.

Congress leader Sandeep Dikshit, the son of former Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit who fought from the seat in 2019, is also a probable candidate from the Northeast Delhi seat, party sources said. Party leaders Alka Lamba and Jai Prakash Aggarwal are being considered for the Chandni Chowk Lok Sabha constituency, and former MP Udit Raj and former Delhi minister Raj Kumar Chauhan are probable candidates for Northwest Delhi, they said.

BJP’s Manoj Tiwari had clinched the Northeast Delhi seat in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, defeating three-time Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit by a record margin of 3,66,102 votes. Lovely was the Congress candidate from the East Delhi constituency in 2019 but lost to cricketer-turned-politician Gautam Gambhir of the BJP by a record margin of 3,91,222 votes.

For the Chandni Chowk seat, the Congress could either field its Mahila Congress president Alka Lamba or party leader Jai Parkash Aggarwal, sources said. Aggarwal, contesting from the Chandni Chowk constituency in 2019, had received the highest number of votes with 29.67 per cent votes among all other Congress candidates.

For the Northwest Lok Sabha constituency, sources said that former MP Udit Raj or former Delhi Minister Raj Kumar Chauhan may be considered as probable candidates.

Currently, BJP’s Hans Raj Hans is the MP from the Northwest Delhi (reserved) seat. In 2019, Hans had defeated second-placed Gugan Singh of the AAP with an emphatic margin of 5,53,075 votes.

In 2014, Udit Raj had won the seat on a BJP ticket by a margin of 1,06,802 votes. In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP had swept all the seven seats in Delhi and set new records in five constituencies where its candidates defeated their opponents with the highest margins ever.