Ashok Gehlot Loyalist And Minister Mahesh Joshi Not In Congress’s List

The 200-member Rajasthan Assembly will go to polls on November 25.

New Delhi:

The Congress on Saturday named 22 more candidates for the Rajasthan assembly polls and denied ticket to Public Health Engineering Department Minister Mahesh Joshi from his Hawa Mahal constituency in Jaipur.

The party fielded its Jaipur unit president R R Tiwari in place of Joshi.

With this, the Congress has so far announced its candidates on 178 seats while leaving one seat – Bharatpur – for the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD).

Joshi, along with two others, was served show-cause notice for not adhering to the party high-command’s orders in September last year.

Joshi, Urban Development and Housing Minister Shanti Dhariwal and Rajasthan Tourism Development Corporation (RTDC) Chairman Dharmendra Rathore were served show-cause notices for going against the party’s whip in 2022.

Dhariwal and Joshi, along with minister Pratap Singh Khachariyawas, had held a meeting at Dhariwal’s residence with the MLAs supporting Chief Minister Gehlot and opposing a change of guard in favour of his bete noire Sachin Pilot.

The 200-member Rajasthan Assembly will go to polls on November 25 and the counting of votes will be taken up on December 3.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)