Sikkim Assembly election will be held on April 11 along with the Lok Sabha polls. The state Assembly has 32 MLAs.

Rai, who was elected in 2014 from Poklok Kamrang assembly seat in South Sikkim, has been denied nomination this time with the chief minister himself deciding to contest from this constituency.

Chamling, who is seeking election for the eighth successive term, will also contest from his traditional seat, Namchi Singithang in South Sikkim which he had won by a convincing margin in the 2014 polls too.

Chamling has dropped three ministers – Sher Bahadur Subedi, Arjun Kumar Ghatani and Tulsi Devi Rai and replaced them with new candidates.

Five other ruling party MLAs have been denied renomination in the first list of candidates.

Here is the full list

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The alliance was forged at a meeting between Mr Goley and Ram Madhav, BJP national general secretary and Northeast in-charge, in New Delhi.

News agency PTI quoted BJP’s Sikkim in-charge Nitin Nabin as saying that the two parties will announce details of seat-sharing soon. “The two parties have decided to form an alliance for the upcoming assembly and Lok Sabha polls in Sikkim,” he told PTI over the phone from New Delhi.

Sikkim, with an assembly strength of 32, has been led by Chief Minister Pawan Kumar Chamling of the SDF since 1994. This has earned Mr Chamling the distinction of being the longest serving chief minister in the country.

The alliance presents both the SKM and the BJP with a win-win situation. Although the SKM had won 10 seats in the last assembly polls, seven of them later defected to the ruling SDF while Mr Golay was disqualified from assembly membership in 2016 after his conviction in a corruption case.

The BJP, for its part, sees this as an opportunity to make inroads into the Himalayan state.

The SDF, which was a member of the National Democratic Alliance as well as the BJP-led Northeast Democratic Alliance (NEDA), lays claim to 29 seats in the Sikkim assembly as well as the state’s Lok Sabha constituency. Earlier, there were indications that the BJP would tie up with a newly formed political party – Hamro Sikkim – led by footballer turned politician Bhaichung Bhutia.

(With inputs from PTI)

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