Kumar Vishwas with Arvind Kejriwal. Kumar Vishwas with Arvind Kejriwal.

A day after AAP rebel leader Kumar Vishwas met Delhi BJP chief Manoj Tiwari, a senior BJP leader suggested Vishwas could be considered to contest from the East Delhi seat, where the Aam Aadmi Party has fielded Atishi.

Sources privy to Monday night’s meeting said the two talked politics at length, with the discussion lasting close to an hour.

According to sources, the Delhi BJP leadership will recommend his name from the seat, but the final decision will be taken by the central leadership. The state BJP unit has already made several recommendations for each seat to the high command. The party is expected to announce the candidates for all seven seats in the capital on April 5.

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While the East Delhi seat is currently held by BJP MP Maheish Girri, sources said there is a chance he could be shifted to Junagadh in Gujarat, where he had earlier been the head of a peeth.

Tiwari and Vishwas have, in the past, met on the sidelines of TV programmes and are learnt to share cordial relations. In one such programme, Vishwas had in a lighter vein said Tiwari had been asking him to come on board.

In 2014, Vishwas contested the Lok Sabha elections from Amethi constituency on an AAP ticket, but lost. His differences with AAP chief Arvind Kejriwal became public in January 2018, when he questioned the candidature of Sushil Gupta and N D Gupta over senior party leaders for the Rajya Sabha seats.

“Vishwas is a sharp orator and has a connect with voters in Delhi because he has spent lot of time campaigning for AAP candidates in the past. The East Delhi seat would suit him because he is from Uttar Pradesh and the area has a sizeable chunk of people from there,” a source in the party said.

Vishwas did not respond to calls seeking a comment.

Meanwhile, the Delhi unit of the BJP will come out with a separate manifesto for the Lok Sabha polls, with a special focus on local issues, Tiwari had said on Monday.

However, statehood will not be a part of the manifesto since Kejriwal “cannot be trusted to run the national capital in its entirety”, he added.

He cited Kejriwal’s decision to sit on a dharna ahead of Republic Day celebrations in 2014 to back his argument. The manifesto is yet to be given final touches, but will include the promise of making Delhi pollution-free and cleaning the Yamuna, Tiwari said.

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