The Bharatiya Janata Party is in a fix whether to retain or shift the constituencies of three Union ministers who are to face the electorate in the first phase of parliamentary election in western Uttar Pradesh when eight constituencies go to polls on April 11.

Their fate will be known when the BJP releases its first list of candidates for Uttar Pradesh, most likely on Monday.

The three Union ministers whose constituencies will go to polls in the first phase are Mahesh Sharma (Noida)  General (Retd) VK Singh (Ghaziabad) and former Mumbai police commissioner Satpal Singh (Baghpat). 

Former Union minister Sanjeev Baliyan (Muzaffarnagar), Rajendra Agarwal (Meerut), Raghav Lakhanpal (Saharanpur) and Kunwar Bharatendra Singh (Bijnor) are the other sitting BJP members representing the constituencies going to poll in the first phase.

The eight constituencies which will go to polls on April 11 include Saharanpur, Kairana, Muzaffarnagar, Bijnor, Meerut, Baghpat, Ghaziabad and Noida (Gautam Buddha Nagar).  The BJP had won all these seats in 2014 elections but lost Kairana to Rashtriya Lok Dal in the bypoll following the death of its sitting member Hukum Singh.

Tabassum Hasan, who won the Kairana seat on RLD ticket, will be Samajwadi Party candidate this time.

Sources said the BJP leadership was likely to declare the list of candidates for the first phase on Monday. “The central parliamentary board is meeting in New Delhi tonight to finalise the list of candidates,” he said.

BJP state general secretary Vijay Bahadur Pathak, who is in-charge of western UP, said here on Sunday that the party had geared up for the polling and the nitty-gritty would be finalised before the end of the last day of the nominations on March 25 for the first phase.

“The Lok Sabha-wise steering committees are meeting round-the-clock to finalise the programme of the nominations and campaigning,” he said, adding that once the candidates’ names were announced, the party would go for massive campaigning.

Pathak said the BJP was strengthening its booth level committees for the past over one year and now every system was in place to take on the opposition at any level.