BJP names 16 candidates for Rajya Sabha elections, Congress 10
NEW DELHI: The BJP, Congress, JD(U) and BJD on Sunday announced candidates for the Rajya Sabha elections scheduled to take place on June 10, featuring big names such as Nirmala Sitharaman, Piyush Goyal, and P Chidambaram.
While there were no major surprises in the Bharatiya Janata Party’s picks, the Congress list seemed to be a snub to the so-called G23 (group of 23) leaders, from whom only Vivek Tankha, a Kashmiri Pandit, made the cut as Anand Sharma and Ghulam Nabi Azad were overlooked.
The elections will be held to fill 57 vacancies across 15 states.
The BJP named 14 candidates apart from Sitharaman and Goyal and the Congress 10, including Chidambaram, Jairam Ramesh, Ajay Maken and chief spokesperson Randeep Surjewala. The lists on Sunday were announced after days of deliberations in each camp, and some senior leaders switching parties.
Former MLA Radha Mohan Das Aggarwal, who vacated his Gorakhpur Urban constituency for chief minister Yogi Adityanath to contest in the recent assembly polls, was among the BJP candidates from Uttar Pradesh. The Bharatiya Janata Party also fielded former state unit chief Laxmikant Vajpayee, sitting Rajya Sabha MP Surendra Singh Nagar and Bauburam Nishad, the chairperson of the UP Backward Classes Finance and Development Corporation from the state.
It fielded two women — Darshana Singh and Sangeeta Yadav — from the state. Singh is a former state head of the party’s women’s wing, while Yadav is a former party MLA from Chauri Chaura in Gorakhpur.
The party announced the names of two candidates each from Karnataka, Maharashtra and Bihar and one candidate each from Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand and Haryana. Union minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi and Vinay Sahasrabuddhe, whose tenures are ending, did not feature in the Bharatiya Janata Party’s first list of candidates.
Union commerce and industry minister Goyal and Anil Sukhdevrao Bonde have been nominated from Maharashtra.
Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman and actorturned-politician Jaggesh will be the party’s nominee from Karnataka. In April, the Bharatiya Janata Party became the single largest party with 100 members in the Upper House.
Of the 57 seats that have fallen vacant, 24 were from the Bharat
iya Janata Party, and the party expects to retain 20 of these.
The Congress, which has suffered severe political losses, fielded Chidambaram from Tamil Nadu, Ramesh from Karnataka, Maken from Haryana and Surjewala from Rajasthan.
The party also fielded Mukul Wasnik and Pramod Tiwari from Rajasthan, Vivek Tankha from Madhya Pradesh, Rajeev Shukla and Ranjeet Ranjan from Chhattisgarh and Imran Pratapgarhi from Maharashtra.
Of the 55 vacancies arising in the Rajya Sabha in the next two months, seven Congress members — Chidambaram (Maharashtra), Ramesh (Karnataka), Ambika Soni (Punjab), Vivek Tankha (Madhya Pradesh), Pradeep Tamta (Uttarakhand), Kapil Sibal (Uttar Pradesh) and Chhaya Verma (Chhattisgarh) — will be completing their terms.
The party suffered a setback last week, with senior party leader and eminent lawyer Kapil Sibal filing his nomination as an independent candidate, supported by the Samajwadi Party on May 25.
The Congress’s list came on a day Jharkhand chief minister Hemant Soren said that the ruling coalition in the state would field a joint candidate for the Rajya Sabha seat and dismissed suggestions that there was any discord with ally Congress.
The Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) leader, however, did not specify whether the candidate would be from his party or the Congress and said the announcement of the name would be from Ranchi. “In the contest of Rajya Sabha polls, it was important to talk to other parties of the coalition, especially the Congress people. I met Sonia Gandhi ji yesterday and we deliberated on many issues, including the Rajya Sabha polls candidature, for over an hour,” Soren said. Two Rajya Sabha seats from Jharkhand will go to the polls as the tenures of Naqvi and BJP MP Mahesh Poddar expire on July 7.
Odisha chief minister and Biju Janata Dal president Naveen Patnaik also announced the names of four candidates.