NEW DELHI: The BJP Thursday fielded Prime Minister Narendra Modi from Varanasi constituency and its president Amit Shah from Gandhinagar in place of L K Advani as it announced its first list of 184 candidates for the Lok Sabha elections.

Senior party leader J P Nadda told a press conference that the party also decided to field Home Minister Rajnath Singh from Lucknow and another Union minister Nitin Gadkari from Nagpur. Both leaders had won from these seats in the last general election.

Union Minister Smriti Irani has been renominated from Amethi and will take on Congress president Rahul Gandhi.

Union minister Kiren Rijiju to fight from Arunachal East. The BJP has also renominated Union ministers V K Singh and Mahesh Sharma from Ghaziabad and Gautam Buddha Nagar (Noida), respectively.

The BJP announced its candidates from many states, including Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Chhattisgarh, West Bengal, Rajasthan, Arunachal Pradesh, and Tripura.

The BJP has finalized names of all 17 party candidates from Bihar and sent the list to the state unit which will announce it jointly with allies, Nadda said.

Lok Sabha elections will begin on April 11 and continue for over a month till May 19 across seven phases, followed by counting of votes on May 23.

The polling will be held on April 11, April 18, April 23, April 29, May 6, May 12 and May 19 for 543 Lok Sabha seats across the country in which nearly 90 crore voters would be eligible to vote.

Out of Kerala's 20 Lok Sabha seats, the BJP is contesting 14 seats, while five seats will be contested by its principal ally, the Bharath Dharma Jana Sena (BDJS), and the Kerala Congress, led by former Union Minister P.C. Thomas, the remaining one seat.

A former Vice-Chancellor of the Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit and considered close to former Kerala Chief Minister Oommen Chandy who made him chairman of the Public Service Commission, Radhakrishnan, who joined the BJP on Sunday, has been asked to contest the Alappuzha Lok Sabha seat, while Alphons will fight it out at Ernakulam, where he will face Hibi Eden of the Congress and former Rajya Sabha member P. Rajeev of the CPI-M.

Speaking to the media in Delhi, Alphons, presently a Rajya Sabha member from Rajasthan, expressed happiness as he said Ernakulam is his second home as he has a house there and lived there when he was practicing as an advocate at the Kerala High Court.

"My opponents are my good friends and the bottom line is what one has done for the people. I represent (Prime Minister Narendra) Modiji who has led the country admirably and that's my strength," he said.

The others include former Mizoram Governor Kummanam Rajasekharan, who quit his post early this month, will take on sitting Congress MP Shashi Tharoor in Thiruvananthapuram, where Communist Party of India veteran and sitting legislator C.Divakaran is also contesting.

Thiruvananthapuram was the only Lok Sabha seat in Kerala where the BJP finished second in the 2014 polls when O.Rajagopal gave Tharoor hiccups before the diplomat-turned-politician won by a margin of around 15,000 votes.

Sobha Surendran, who secured 1.36 lakh votes from Palakkad seat in 2014, has been fielded this time from Attingal, the suburban constituency in the state capital district.

Among the other top state leaders who have found a seat are A.N. Radhakrishnan (Chalakudy), and C.K. Padmanabhan (Kannur), Raveesh Thantri Kuntar (Kasargode), V.K. Sajeevan (Vadakara), K.P. Prakash Babu (Kozhikode) and Unnikrishnan Master (Malappuram), V.T. Rema (Ponnani) C. Krishnakumar (Palakkad) and K.V. Sabu (Kollam).

The BJP candidate from Pathanamthitta has not been announced.