On Saturday, the Indian National Congress Party is likely to decide upon the nominees for the upcoming Rajya Sabha biennial elections. The meeting which will be chaired by Congress interim president Sonia Gandhi, will be attended by party general secretaries, former party chief Rahul Gandhi will join the meeting via video conference from London.
According to the reports, the meeting will include veteran leaders like P Chidambaram, Ghulam Nabi Azad, Anand Sharma, Vivek Tankha, Ajay Maken, Rajeev Shukla, Mukul Wasnik, and Pramod Tiwari along with other local leaders and minority faces.
In the Rajya Sabha elections that are scheduled to be held on June 10, the Congress party is expected to win eight Rajya Sabha seats, largely from Rajasthan and Chattishgarh. Reports mention that the party has decided to contest three Rajya Sabha seats in Rajasthan while it is confident to bag two seats from the state of Chattisgarh. The party is also expecting a seat from Jharkhand where it is in alliance with Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM).
Further from the Congress, former Finance Minister P Chidambaram and Rajya Sabha Chief whip Jairam Ramesh are likely to be renominated. Reports speculate that while Ramesh would get a renomination from the state of Karnataka, P Chidambaram, who represents Maharashtra, may move to Tamil Nadu to fight elections
Meanwhile, leaders like Ghulam Nabi Azad, Anand Sharma, and Vivek Tankha who had spearheaded the G-23 rebel group are also under consideration. It is speculated that Azad may be fielded from either Maharashtra or Rajasthan while senior leader Bhupinder Hooda would contest from Haryana. Other leaders like Ajay Maken, Randeep Surjewala, Pramod Tiwari, Dr. Ajoy Kumar, Mukul Wasnik, and Rajiv Shukla are also in the fray for the ticket and are hoping to bag the nominations.
Recently, the Congress lone Rajya Sabha MP from Uttar Pradesh Kapil Sibal quit the party and decided to fight the said elections as an independent with the support of the Samajwadi Party. He resigned from the party on May 16 and stated that he had always wanted to be an independent voice in the country.
Rahul Gandhi to join the Congress meeting ‘virtually’
Reportedly, Rahul Gandhi who seems to have extended his controversial visit to Great Britain is supposed to attend the meeting virtually. Last week, the Congress scion left for a controversial visit to London to attend a few events, where his comments about India created a lot of outrage back home. He delivered a speech at the ‘Ideas for India’ conference organized by the think-tank Bridge India, where he promoted sub-nationalism, besides trying to instigate anarchy in the country by calling for a ‘mass action’ against the Indian state.
Rahul also delivered another controversial speech at an event titled ‘India at 75’ at Corpus Christi College at Cambridge University, hosted by a Congress party sympathizer Shruti Kapila. He blatantly compared India to confederations such as European Union and refused to acknowledge the federal democratic setup which exists in India. As per Gandhi, India’s political formation is much like a loosely-connected supranational European Union, where multinational political unions together negotiated power as an arrangement.
According to the reports, Rahul neither took the mandatory government approval for this trip, which is mandatory nor informed the government before he traveled abroad.
The upcoming Rajya Sabha election on June 10 is extremely crucial as it comes ahead of the Presidential election in 2022. The 57 Rajya Sabha seats up for grabs are spread across 15 states including Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, and Rajasthan. Out of these, the maximum number of seats falling vacant is in Uttar Pradesh. While 11 seats will fall vacant in Uttar Pradesh, six each will retire from Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra, five from Bihar, and four each from Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Karnataka.
