NEW DELHI: BJP’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi will contest the upcoming Lok Sabha polls from Vadodara in addition to Varanasi, the party announced in Delhi on Wednesday after a marathon meeting that was marred by senior leader LK Advani ’s dogged but seemingly unsuccessful bid to shift his constituency from Gandhinagar to Bhopal.Gujarat chief minister Modi prevailed upon the party to keep an absent and sulking Advani from moving out of the constituency in Gujarat that he has represented five times, arguing that this would gift the opposition a campaign issue.Although the party declared Advani’s candidature from Gandhinagar after an eight-hour long meeting, there was no word from the 86-year-old leader on the issue. Advani is keeping his options open , a person close to him said. Significantly, the party did not announce any candidate from Bhopal in its list of 67 released on Wednesday.Senior leaders Sushma Swaraj and Nitin Gadkari met Advani to convey the party’s decision and thereafter visited BJP president Rajnath Singh late in the evening for a meeting, details of which were not immediately available. "Modi ji kept saying that Advani ji had to be convinced at any cost. Advani ji’s shifting out from Gujarat would have reflected very badly on him. It would have given his opponents enough ammunition to last the entire campaign — that Modi could not keep the party’s most senior leader within the state," said a member of the BJP’s central election committee.Advani kept away from the meeting of the party’s parliamentary board, which was held before the central election committee met to finalise candidates from Rajasthan, Gujarat, UP and other states.The list of candidates released by the party included names for 21 of the 25 seats in Rajasthan and 10 in Gujarat. The prominent candidates include actor Hema Malini (Mathura); Vithalbhai Radadiya (Porbandar), who has criminal cases against him; Olympian Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore (Jaipur-Rural); Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje’s son and MP Dushyant Singh (Jhalawar) and Ashwani Choubey (Buxar).Advani ignored repeated requests from senior leaders to attend the meeting, party members said. Advani was "hurt" when the Gujarat BJP unit did not send his name in the list of candidates from the state on Tuesday, a person familiar with the matter said. When Advani expressed his unhappiness, another list was sent late on Tuesday which only had Advani’s name from Gandhinagar. He thought it was an afterthought and took it as the state unit’s antipathy to his candidature from there."Advani ji was not convinced about support from the cadres in Gujarat. Even during the 2009 campaign, he did not get too much support from them and his family went and camped in Gandhinagar for the entire duration of the campaign," a BJP leader close to Advani said, adding that the former deputy prime minister therefore decided to accept the invitation of Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan to contest from Bhopal."It was a master stroke by Advani, whose preference for Chouhan over Modi is not a secret," said a BJP leader. "With this tantrum, Advani has made sure that the Gujarat state workers will ensure his victory from Gandhinagar, a constituency that he has represented since 1998."Candidature from Bhopal would have ensured Advani a much easier and bigger victory, but it could have shown him up as a bit of a coward who ran away from his seat for fear of losing, the leader added.