RS nominations for 57 seats in 15 states roil leaders across parties

From the Congress to the Janata Dal United (JDU), from Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Rajya Sabha nominations for 57 seats across 15 states, which will close on Tuesday, have roiled waters across parties.

Elections are due on June 10 and will be an important element in the presidential election to be held in July.

The BJP list, by and large, has been the most predictable. Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman from Karnataka and commerce minister Piyush Goyal from Maharashtra were up for re-election and they have been renominated.

However, minority affairs minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi’s term is also set to end but he has not been named in the list by the party. This means he will have to resign from his position in the council of ministers unless he is elected to the Lok Sabha within six months.

His old Lok Sabha constituency, Rampur, will see a by-election on June 23, for which the Samajwadi Party has already named Azam Khan as its candidate. For the BJP, this will be a prestigious battle.

Another minister who faces uncertainty is JDU nominee and Union minister for steel, RCP Singh, who was considered no 2 to Nitish Kumar at one time. He was denied a third term as the JDU’s Rajya Sabha MP. He said he was “grateful” at being denied a Rajya Sabha seat.

“What he (Nitish Kumar) decided, I am grateful to him. Whatever he has decided is in my interest. I have not done anything to date that should make anyone upset,” he said. Socialist leader Anil Hegde and JDU chief from neighbouring Jharkhand, Khiru Mahto have been named nominees by Nitish Kumar.

This brings to an end, an embarrassing tussle in the party with leaders calling off a scheduled press conference in Patna on Sunday. This is because they were not sure who was going to be the party’s nominee.

RCP Singh, an IAS officer, is a fellow Kurmi and was the Bihar chief minister’s right-hand man until he is thought to have developed good relations with the BJP. This may have irked Nitish. In “punishing” RCP Singh, Nitish is arguably daring the BJP to act.

The BJP has not been inured from internal differences on its choice of candidates either.

In Rajasthan, the party’s candidate is Ghanshyam Tiwari, a 6-time MLA and a critic of former chief minister Vasundhara Raje. So critical was he of the BJP CM that he left the party during the 2018 Assembly polls and formed his own party.

Also, for a short period, he joined hands with the Congress, too, but allowed himself to return home after being persuaded to do so by a BJP leader.

Tiwari is from RSS background with over 45 years of experience in politics. That he has been nominated to the Upper House could also mean his absence from state politics. This could strengthen the Raje faction of the BJP in the state.

However, the maximum heartburn has been in the Congress where articulate Delhi leader Pawan Khera has been denied a Rajya Sabha seat as has been the case with Tamil Nadu leader and actor Nagma.

Both Anand Sharma and Ghulam Nabi Azad have been dropped from the Upper House though Sharma was given important party responsibilities in poll-bound Himachal Pradesh earlier.

Randeep Singh Surjewala, Mukul Wasnik and Pramod Tiwari have all been named as Congress candidates from Rajasthan, ignoring state leaders.

Now, there will be six Congress MPs in the Rajya Sabha, but only one candidate — Neeraj Dangi — comes from Rajasthan, while the rest are outsiders.

Earlier, former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Congress national organisation general secretary K.C. Venugopal and Neeraj Dangi were Congress Rajya Sabha MPs.

JMM chief and CM of Jharkhand Hemant Soren met Sonia Gandhi in a bid to resolve differences between his party and Congress on the issue of Rajya Sabha nominations. But after the meeting he said there were no differences.

The maximum number of seats — that is, 11 — lies in Uttar Pradesh. Here, the BJP has fielded Laxmikant Vajpayee, Radha Mohan Agarwal, Surendra Nagar, Baburam Nishad, Darshana Singh and Sangeeta Yadav so far.