The ruling Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) has expedited its candidate selection process and the 12-member state level committee headed by Chief Minister Dr Manik Saha held its first meeting in Agartala on Friday. The meeting is likely to continue till Saturday. The state Karyakarini meeting also will be held on Saturday, where the Union Minister Dharmendra Pradhan and party’s national spokesperson Sambit Patra also will remain present.

The candidate selection meeting was attended by all senior leaders including the state president Rajib Bhattacharjee, former Chief Minister and MP Biplab Kumar Deb, former Union Minister Pratima Bhowmik, former deputy chief minister Jishnu Dev Varma etc. The national organizing secretary Rabindra Raju also attended the meeting.

Sources said that the state level candidate selection committee will submit their report to the Karyakarini meeting which will give the final approval to the list of candidates. It is expected that the party will start filing nominations from Monday. The party has already decided to make nomination filing a major issue and decided to mobilize the maximum number of people in each block.

There are 6370 seats in 606 Panchayats, 423 seats in 35 Panchayat Samities and 116 seats in 8 Zilla Parishad. The 63 ‘Prabharis’ appointed by the party have extensively visited different places and recommended three names for each of the seats. The state level candidate selection committee will pick up one each. It may be recalled that the party has earlier set a few criteria for selection of candidates. These include Educational qualification, if there is any criminal background, social services, loyalty to the party etc.

It is learnt that the party candidates will start filing nominations from Monday. The party has decided to make filing nominations a major event and to mobilize the maximum number of people in all the block offices.