AAP panel meet today to decide RS nominees

THE PARTY HAS ALREADY FINALISED THE NAME OF SENIOR LEADER SANJAY SINGH AS ONE NOMINEE

NEW DELHI : The political affairs committee of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) will meet on Wednesday to decide and announce its nominees for the Rajya Sabha polls.

The meeting will be convened by AAP chief and Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal and deputy CM Manish Sisodia.

While senior party leader Sanjay Singh has already made the cut, several names of ‘ground-level workers’ emerged on Tuesday as likely contenders for the three seats in the Upper House, three days ahead of the last day of filing nominations on January 5.

Sources said the party had floated names of ND Gupta, a chartered accountant and Sushil Gupta, a businessman for the Rajya Sabha. ND Gupta, vice-president of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI), has been working for the party as chartered accountant for two years. Sushil Gupta is a businessman and runs Delhi’s Ganga group of institutions.

Both the names were considered for being ‘ground level’ workers. Some of the names which were also did the rounds were former RBI governor Raghuram Rajan, former Union ministers Yashwant Sinha and Arun Shourie, and former chief justice of India TS Thakur, who turned down AAP’S offer.

“Chief minister, Arvind Kejriwal and deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia are back from holidays. The leaders will convene a meeting of political affairs committee at 5 pm on Wednesday to make a formal announcement,” said a party leader who did not want to be named. Before the PAC meet, Kejriwal will meet the party MLA’S as a routine weekly schedule at 11 am at his 6, Flag Staff Road residence.

The elections for three Rajya Sabha members from Delhi would be held on January 16 as terms of the incumbent members, Dr Karan Singh, Janardan Dwivedi and Parvez Hashmi — all from the Congress — would expire on January 27.

The ruling AAP which holds a majority (66) in the 70-member Delhi Assembly, is set to win all the three seats.

Nominations will be filed likely by Thursday.

From the outset, party was keen on having outsiders -- personalities of prominence from varied fields -- as its Rajya Sabha representatives. But with seven rejections, leaders started thinking of internal candidates. A party leader said that they were not interested for they did not want to be attacked by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

“Then, we decided to think of 10 party leaders such as Ashutosh, Ashish Khetan, Atishi Marlena, Raghav Chadha, Pankaj Gupta, Prithvi Reddy, Ashish Talwar, Dilip Pandey, Deepak Bajpai and Sanjay Singh. Though Singh’s name is final, we did not want the announcement to lead to bad blood within the party for nominating two from the long list. So, we are still thinking on some others such as ND Gupta,” he said.

The uncertainty in deciding other names for the Rajya Sabha had already led to rift within the party. A group of supporters of founder-member Kumar Vishwas barged into the party office at Deen Dayal Upadhyay Marg on Thursday last week, demanding that he be picked for the Upper House.