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FM Sitharaman, Piyush Goyal among BJP’s 16 candidates for Rajya Sabha polls
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 BJP, Congress, JDU 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 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 BJP’s first list of candidates.
Union commerce and industry minister Goyal and Anil Sukhdevrao Bonde have been nominated from Maharashtra. Union finance minister Sitharaman and actor-turned-politician Jaggesh will be the party’s nominee from Karnataka.
In April, the BJP became the single largest party with 100 members in the Upper House. Of the 57 seats that have fallen vacant, 24 were from the BJP, 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. The BJD named three new candidates -- Sulata Deo, Manas Ranjan Mangaraj and Niranjan Bishi -- and renominated Sasmit Patra for the polls.
Patnaik chose Bishi, a tribal face of the party in the western region of the state, while Mangaraj is from the coastal belt and Patra is the former president of the Odisha Minority Forum. Deo is the only woman among the four BJD nominees for the Rajya Sabha polls.
The tenure of three incumbent Rajya Sabha MPs from Odisha will expire on July 1, while another seat in the Upper House of Parliament fell vacant due to the resignation of the BJD’s Subhas Singh. The by-election to another seat of the Upper House will be conducted on June 13.
