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No surprises in Samata Party's first list for Bihar

The Samata Party on Wednesday released its first list of ten candidates in Bihar. The list includes party president George Fernandes and three sitting members of the dissolved Lok Sabha.

Of the 54 seats in the state, the Samata Party has been allotted 22 seats. The remaining 32 seats will be contested by its ally, the Bharatiya Janata Party.

Party spokesman Digvijay Singh said the other list of candidates for Bihar and other states will be released later. He said the party expects to contest about 40 Lok Sabha seats, and that talks with the BJP on seat-sharing in other states were continuing.

The three other members of the dissolved House who figure in the list are Nitish Kumar (Barh), Mahendra Paitha (Bagaha-SC) and Brahmanand Mandal (Monghyr). Fernandes will seek re-election from Nalanda.

The party had six members in the dissolved Lok Sabha. One of them, Anand Mohan Singh, elected from Sheohar was expelled from the party last year. The other member, Ram Bahadur Singh, who has since moved over to the Samajwadi Party, was elected from Maharajganj.

Former chief minister Abdul Ghafoor has been named as the party candidate from Gopalganj.

Former Union minister Krishna Sahi, who joined the Samata Party recently, will seek election from Begusarai, the constituency she had earlier represented as a Congress leader.

The other party nominees figuring in today's list are: Brishin Patel (Vaishali), Digvijay Singh (Banka), Shakuni Choudhary (Khagaria), and Vashisht Narain Singh (Bikramganj).

Digvijay Singh said the Samata Party did not rule out the possibility of joining hands with the United Front wherever it could help defeat the candidates of the Rashtriya Janata Dal led by Laloo Prasad Yadav.

Both the high profile constituencies of Madhepura (Sharad Yadav versus Laloo Prasad Yadav) and Hajipur (Ram Vilas Paswan) fall in the Samata Party's quota, he said, and the party will field candidates for these two seats.

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