In its seventh list, Congress announces four candidates for Chhattisgarh, one for T.N.

The Congress on Tuesday announced its seventh list of candidates for the Lok Sabha polls. The list has five names, four of them from Chhattisgarh and one from Tamil Nadu.

With these four — Shashi Singh from Surguja, Menka Devi Singh from Raigarh, Biresh Thakur from Kanker (all three seats reserved for the Scheduled Tribes) and Devendra Singh Yadav from Bilaspur — the party has now announced all the names from Chhattisgarh that has 11 parliamentary constituencies.

Among them, Mr. Yadav, a twotime MLA from Bhilai Nagar, has been named as an accused by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) in the alleged coal levy money laundering case, one of the major corruption allegations faced by the previous Congress government in the State. In last year’s Assembly election where the Congress faced a rout, he was the lone exception.

Ms. Menka Devi Singh, the party’s pick from Raigarh, hails from the erstwhile Sarangarh royal family. Her father, Naresh Chandra Singh, was the last king and had held the chief ministership of undivided Madhya Pradesh for a rather brief tenure, after having been a Minister for 16 years.

Its Sarguja candidate,

Shashi Singh, also hails from a political family and carries forward the legacy of Tuleshwar Singh, a former Minister in Chhattisgarh.

She will take on her former party colleague, Chintamani Mahraj, who has been given ticket by the BJP. Notably, the BJP had swept all 14 seats in Sarguja in the last Assembly polls.

Mr. Thakur, from Kanker, is one of the two candidates who had contested in 2019 and has been fielded again, the other being sitting MP Jyotsana Mahant, who has been retained.

From Tamil Nadu’s Mayiladuthurai constituency, State Mahila Congress president R. Sudha has been fielded. The party has now named all its picks for the seats it will contest as a constituent of INDIA bloc.

One of them is an accused in the alleged coal levy money laundering case