The Bharatiya Janata Party on Monday named Kamalakanta Hansda as its candidate for the Kashipur seat in Purulia district. The seat will go to the polls in the first phase of the West Bengal Assembly elections on March 27.

Even though the party had on Saturday released its first list of 57 candidates for the first two phases of polls, it did not name candidates for three of the 60 seats including Kashipur.

On Monday, the party announced Hansda's candidature for Kashipur seat, an influential tribal leader, taking the number of seats for which candidates have been announced to 58.

The candidate list gave special emphasis to new faces and politically crucial backward communities as most of the seats that will go to poll on that day are either reserved seats or have a high density of SC and ST population.

A total of 60 seats will go to the poll in the first two phases of the poll. The opposition BJP had bagged eight of the nine seats in the tribal Jangalmahal area in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls.

The West Bengal Assembly elections, which is poised to be a stiff contest between the TMC and the BJP, will be held in eight phases beginning with polling on March 27. Votes will be counted on May 2.

With inputs from PTI