New Delhi: The BJP on Monday (March 16) released its first list of candidates for the West Bengal and Kerala elections scheduled for next month, fielding 144 persons so far in Bengal and 47 people in Kerala.Among its candidates in West Bengal is the BJP’s firebrand leader of opposition Suvendu Adhikari, whom it has fielded not only from his current seat of Nandigram but also in Bhabanipur, for which chief minister Mamata Banerjee is the incumbent MLA.Adhikari, a one-time lieutenant of Banerjee’s, defeated the Trinamool Congress supremo by a little less than 2,000 votes in his seat of Nandigram in 2021, causing Banerjee to have to contest from Bhabanipur in order to get back in the state assembly. Earlier this month she had projected confidence in winning the latter seat “even if there is only one voter left on the voters’ list” following the controversial special intensive revision.Dilip Ghosh, a former president of the BJP’s West Bengal unit, will contest from the Kharagpur Sadar seat that he represented from 2016 to 2019, when he was elected to the Lok Sabha from Medinipur.Another prominent name in the party’s first list is former Rajya Sabha MP and editor Swapan Dasgupta, who is to fight from the Rashbehari constituency that falls in Kolkata city.Forty-one sitting BJP MLAs, three former MLAs and two former MPs figure in the list, The Hindu reported.West Bengal, where the special intensive revision is over but where lakhs of voters’ electoral fate remains ‘under adjudication’, will go to polls in two phases: one on April 23 and the second on April 29. The state has 294 seats.In Kerala, perhaps the BJP’s most prominent candidate is former Union junior electronics and IT minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar, who has been fielded from Nemom in Thiruvananthapuram district.Nemom happens to be the only assembly constituency in Kerala that the party has ever won – its O. Rajagopal had won it in the 2016 elections. Chandrasekhar, who was made president of the BJP’s state unit last year, lost the 2024 Lok Sabha polls from Thiruvananthapuram to incumbent Shashi Tharoor of the Congress.Union junior minister for minority affairs as well as fisheries, animal husbandry and dairying George Kurian, who now represents Madhya Pradesh in the Rajya Sabha, will contest from Kanjirappally in Kottayam district.Former state unit presidents K. Surendran and P.K. Krishnadas will once again try their luck from Manjeshwar and Kattakkada respectively.The BJP finalised its first list for the two states during a meeting of its central election committee on March 12, it said.Elections will be held in Kerala, which has 140 assembly constituencies, in a single phase on April 9.Votes here and in Bengal will be counted on May 4.