Advani asked me to contest: Sushma Swaraj

BJP leader Sushma Swaraj has said she was aked to contest the Lok Sabha elections by party's prime ministerial candidate LK Advani who had also wanted other senior leaders Arun Jaitley and M Venkaiah Naidu to join the electoral fray.
 
Swaraj, fielded by the  BJP from Vidisha, said earlier there were indications that she would not be asked to fight the Lok Sabha polls. But all that changed on January 25 when Advani asked her to contest the general elections.

Advani apparently altered his mind after he realised that "those considered close to him were not fighting the Lok Sabha elections," Swaraj said.

She said that Advani had not only asked her but also told other senior party leaders Arun Jaitley and M Venkaiah Naidu to contest the general elections.

Jaitley and Naidu, however, have not been named in the candidates list till now.

The BJP leader said once Advani made his views clear, she did not have any second thoughts about contesting. 

But Swaraj maintained that her decision to contest from Madhya Pradesh should not come as a surprise."I have been a member of Rajya Sabha from Madhya Pradesh for the last three years and this state was not new for me," she said

She said that she had left her home state of Haryana long back and had contested two Lok Sabha elections from New Delhi and was also Delhi chief minister for some time. 

Swaraj said initially she wished to contest from Bhopal which is represented Lok Sabha member Kailash Joshi but when she came to know that Joshi was still desirous of contesting from Bhopal, she settled for Vidisha.

Atal Bihari Vajpayee had won from Vidisha in 1991. Shivraj Singh Chouhan was also Lok Sabha member from Vidisha when he became Madhya Pradesh chief minister.

But the constituency did not prove lucky for the present MP from Vidisha, Rampal Singh, who lost the Assembly elections in 2008.

Swaraj said at present all political parties and coalitions in the country were in a state of disarray but claimed the NDA was still best placed among them.

The United Progressive Alliance had now been reduced to an "Unlimited Prime Ministers Alliance", she adding, there was no dearth of prime ministerial aspirants both in the Congress and the UPA.

The senior BJP leader said that the Congress did not know whether it wanted Manmohan Singh or Rahul Gandhi to be prime minister. Swaraj said many leaders of the UPA, including Sharad Pawar, Lalu Yadav and even Ram Vilas Paswan, had
already expressed their desire to occupy the country's top post.

Though the BJP did suffer a setback when the BJD parted ways with it in Orissa, she claimed it could be offset by the fact that INLD in Haryana, AGP in Assam and RLD in Uttar Pradesh had come together with the NDA.