Mumbai, April 23: Bollywood actor Sunny Deol on Tuesday joined the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in presence of Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. The development comes days after the 62-year-old actor met BJP chief Amit Shah at Pune Airport lounge. After the meeting, speculations were rife that the actor would join the saffron party and most likely to contest from Gurdaspur Lok Sabha constituency in Punjab.

The Bollywood actor's father, Dharmendra had also won the 2004 Lok Sabha elections from Bikaner parliamentary constituency on the BJP ticket. Meanwhile, Deol's step-mother Hema Malini is also BJP candidate from Mathura parliamentary seat.

The saffron party is contesting the general polls in alliance with the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) on three seats out of 13 in Punjab. Three seats on which the BJP is contesting are Amritsar, Gurdaspur and Hoshiarpur. The saffron party is still finding a face for Gurdaspur Lok Sabha constituency after the death of Vinod Khanna. The party has still not announced any candidate from this parliamentary seat.

Meanwhile, in 2014 Lok Sabha elections, Khanna who contested on the BJP ticket had won the elections from Gurdaspur. But after his death, by-polls took place in 2017 in which Congress’ Sunil Jakhar defeated BJP candidate Swaran Salaria by over 1.5 lakh votes. Meanwhile, in 2009, Congress’ Pratap Singh Bajwa had defeated Khanna by a huge margin. Punjab Lok Sabha Elections 2019 Dates: Constituency-Wise Complete Schedule Of Voting And Results For General Elections.

Punjab will go for polls in the last phase on May 19. The Election Commission of India announced dates for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. The elections will take place in seven phases, and the results will be declared on May 23. Around 10 lakh polling stations will be set up across the country for the parliamentary polls.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Apr 23, 2019 12:04 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).