BHOPAL: Retired IAS officer Bhagirath Prasad , who was fielded from Bhind constituency in Madhya Pradesh (MP) for the general election 2014 by the Congress party in the list announced on Saturday, jolted the party on Sunday by deciding to join BJP .

Bhagirath Prasad had contested from Bhind in 2009 elections from Congress ticket and lost the fray.

Congress has decided to rely on its sitting MPs rather than trying new faces as it is reflected in the first list of 22 candidates from the state announced on Saturday.

All the sitting MPs were repeated from their respective seats in the list. Some candidates, who had put up a reasonably tough fight against BJP rivals and lost, were also been maintained.

Sitting MLAs Heena Kaware and Sunderlal Tiwari have also been given Lok Sabha ticket from Balaghat and Rewa respectively.

Additional solicitor general Vivek Tankha, who off late has been close to chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, is the congress candidate from Jabalpur.

PC Sharma got party’s sanction to contest an election from Bhopal after a decade. Union ministers Kamal Nath and Jyotiraditya Scindia will contest from their traditional constituencies Chhindwara and Guna respectively.

State Congress chief Arun Yadav will again contest from Khandwa, where Aam Admi Party (AAP) has fielded Narmada Bachao Andolan activist Alok Agrawal.

Other names cleared from MP in the list of 194 candidates include Ashok Singh from Gwalior, Govind Singh Rajput from Sagar, Dr Kamleshwar Verma from Tikamgarh, Mahendra Pratap from Damoh, Rajesh Nandini Singh from Shahdol, Indrajeet Patel from Sidhi, Sajjan Verma from Dewas, Prem Chand Guddu from Ujjain, Meenakshi Natarajan from Mandsaur, Kantilal Bhuriya from Ratlam, Satyanarayan Patel from Indore, Ramesh Patel from Khargone, Raja Pateria from Khujuraho and Rahul Chaudhary from Betul. Meenakshi Natrajan and Satyanarayan Patel were elected candidates by party workers through primaries organized at behest of party vice president Rahul Gandhi in 15 constituencies across the country.