By Bhupen Goswami

Guwahati : Guwahati MP Bijoya Chakravarty can take comfort that she is not denied ticket for any other reason but for her age as the BJP stuck to the original plan of easing off leaders who are above 75. Mrs. Chakravarty is 85 and many like her have been gracefully eased off from the party and the leadership have also accepted that. The 91-year-old L K Advani was eased off from Gandhi Nagar where Amit Shah is contesting and now Speaker Sumitra Mahajan may find the axe as she is 76 . She has been winning from Indore since 1989. Besides Mr Advani, several senior MPs like Bhagat Singh Koshyari, 76, from Nainital and BC Khanduri, 85, from Pauri in Uttarakhand are left out, while Shanta Kumar, 84, the MP from Kangra in Himachal Pradesh announced his retirement. Another veteran, Murli Manohar Joshi may also be dropped from his constituency Kanpur . Similarly in Jharkhand, senior BJP leader Kariya Munda (84), representing Khunti, is being dropped in favour of former chief minister Arjun Munda from that constituency. In Bihar, Hukum Dev Narayan Yadav, 79, has already expressed his desire to retire from active politics. The BJP today announced his son, Ashok Yadav’s name as a candidate from Madhubani, the constituency of Yadav senior. Another BJP veteran, Kalraj Mishra from Deoria in Uttar Pradesh, is over 75 and has already told his party that he will not be contesting. This is noteworthy that two senior leaders and ministers in the Narendra Modi cabinet, Sushma Swaraj and Uma Bharti, have declined to contest citing health reasons. Both are however in their sixties.