The Bharatiya Janata Party on Tuesday declared its second list of 29 candidates for the upcoming Assembly elections in Delhi.

With this, the number of candidates announced by the Hindutva party for the 70-member Assembly reached 58.

The Assembly elections in Delhi will take place in a single phase on February 5 and the counting of votes will take place on February 8.

In the second list, the BJP replaced its incumbent MLA from Karawal Nagar, Mohan Singh Bisht, with Kapil Mishra, a former minister in the Aam Aadmi Party government.

Mishra was elected from Karawal Nagar on an Aam Aadmi Party in 2015. He joined the BJP in August 2019. However, he was not given any organisational responsibility in the party until August 2023 when he was appointed as a vice president of the party’s Delhi unit.

Mishra had been under fire for his speech on February 23, 2020, when he amassed a crowd and gave an ultimatum to the police to clear the streets of protesters who were demonstrating against the Citizenship Act amendments in Jafrabad.

The BJP leader – in the presence of a senior police officer – had demanded that the police evict the protestors and threatened violence if they failed to do so within three days.

In July 2020, a 10-member fact-finding committee of the Delhi Minorities Commission had said that the violence occurred almost immediately after Mishra’s speech in Maujpur in the presence of Deputy Commissioner of Police Ved Prakash Surya.

Apart from Mishra, the BJP named Priyanka Gautam, another Aam Aadmi Party turncoat and a former councillor, from the Scheduled Caste-reserved Kondli seat.

Former Delhi Chief Minister Madan Lal Khurana’s son, Harish Khurana, has been fielded from the Moti Nagar seat. Parvesh Verma, who is the son of former Delhi Chief Minister Sahib Singh Verma, was named in the party’s first list to contest against Aam Aadmi Party national convener Arvind Kejriwal from the New Delhi seat.

The BJP’s second list features the names of five women, including Deepti Indora from Matia Mahal and Neelam Pahalwan from Najafgarh. With this, the party has fielded seven women so far.

Soon after the poll schedule was announced on Tuesday, Delhi BJP chief Virendraa Sachdeva said that the people of the national capital were eagerly waiting for the poll dates to be announced, as they had resolved to remove the Aam Aadmi Party from power.

The Aam Aadmi Party has been in power in the national capital since 2013, except for a year of president’s rule between 2014 and 2015.

In the 2020 polls, the AAP won 62 seats with a 53.8% vote share. The remaining eight seats were won by the BJP, which secured 38.7% of the votes. With a 4.3% vote share, the Congress failed to win any seat.

The Aam Aadmi Party and the Congress are contesting the polls separately even though they are members of the Opposition INDIA bloc at the national level. In the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, the AAP-Congress alliance lost all seven parliamentary seats in Delhi to the BJP.