On Sunday, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) announced Mohan Singh Bisht as its candidate for the Mustafabad seat in the upcoming Delhi Assembly elections scheduled to be held on February 5.
This is part of the third list of candidates released by the BJP, and Bisht is the sole name under this list.
In fact, the veteran BJP leader, now an MLA for Karawal Nagar in Delhi, had also expressed his strongest dissent with the party's move to field Kapil Mishra from his constituency.
Bisht, who won the Karawal Nagar seat in the 2020 Delhi elections, slammed the BJP's move as "a big mistake."
The controversy began when the BJP replaced Bisht with Mishra, a former Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader, as the party's candidate for Karawal Nagar. Bisht, who has been a key figure in Karawal Nagar politics since 1998, did not take kindly to the decision.
In an outspoken statement, he declared that he would not accept the party’s decision to field Mishra and refused to contest elections from any other constituency. Instead, he vowed to file his nomination from Karawal Nagar, asserting that he would be contesting from the seat before January 17.
The replace Bisht with Kapil Mishra was announced in the second list of 29 candidates for the BJP, that caused significant backlash, especially from the supporters of Bisht. He is a veteran leader who has won elections multiple times from Karawal Nagar constituency.
Kapil Mishra, who had contested the Karawal Nagar seat on an AAP ticket during the 2015 elections, had defeated Bisht at that time.
Suspended from the party in 2017 on allegations of corruption within AAP after his stint as a minister in the AAP government, Mishra is contesting against Bisht this time.
His dramatic exit from AAP marked a turning point, and in 2019, he joined the BJP where he made headlines with his controversial remarks regarding anti-citizenship law protests, calling protest sites "mini Pakistans".
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