PM Modi (left), YogiAdityanath, Pawan Singh (agencies)
NEW DELHI: The Bharatiya Janata Party on Thursday released its first list of 40 star campaigners for the upcoming Bihar Assembly elections. It includes the party’s national and state top brass, led by PM Narendra Modi. It also features the BJP national president JP Nadda, and senior ministers in the Central government; Union defense minister Rajnath Singh, home minister Amit Shah, road transport minister Nitin Gadkari and agricultural minister Shivraj Siungh Chouhan among other ministers. The exhaustive list of 40 campaigners draws majority saffron party’s major leaders from the northern India or the Hindi-belt. It also includes chief ministers of all the BJP ruled neighbouring states and states with a good immigrant population from Bihar. CMs in the list are; Uttar Pradesh CM Yogi Adityanath, Assam CM Hemanta Bishwa Sarma, Delhi CM Rekha Gupta, Madhya Pradesh CM Mohan Yadav, and Maharashtra CM Devendra Fadnavis. It also brings back people out of political limelight for a while and the ones who haven’t received a ticket to fight elections, former Union cabinet minister Smriti Irani is the biggest name in the list, it also includes former Central ministers Ravi Shankar Prasad, Radha Mohan Singh, Sadvi Niranjan Jyoti, Ashwini Kumar Chaubey. Another big name on the list is Nand Kishore Yadav, the current speaker of Bihar Assembly who has been denied a ticket to contest the upcoming polls, he has been a MLA since 1995. It also includes some of the biggest names of the Bhojpuri cinema, actor-singer turned politician and MPs Manoj Tiwari, Ravi Kishan; Pawan Singh, Nirahua are also on the list.