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With a day left for the deadline to submit nomination papers for the February 27 Rajya Sabha elections, the Congress is most likely to unveil the rest of its list on Wednesday.
As Manoj CG reported, Congress Parliamentary Party chairperson Sonia Gandhi will stay on in Parliament but from the Upper House, representing Rajasthan. Sonia will be in Jaipur on Wednesday to file her nomination and is likely to be accompanied by her son and party MP Rahul Gandhi and Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge. Her Raebareli Lok Sabha seat in Uttar Pradesh will most likely go to her daughter and Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra.
While this in a way will mark the end of a chapter for the party, it will be interesting to see who else finds space in the Congress list. Among those reported to be angling for a Rajya Sabha berth is former Madhya Pradesh Congress president Kamal Nath under whose leadership the party received a drubbing in the state elections in December. Of the 56 Rajya Sabha seats up for grabs, the Congress is expected to retain at least nine, including one from Madhya Pradesh.
No end to INDIA alliance’s troubles
In the larger scheme of things, the Rajya Sabha elections are unlikely to be at the top of the Congress’s priority list at the moment given that the future of the Opposition INDIA alliance looks bleaker by the day.
The political experiment that started in June 2023 has faltered in recent weeks with the exits of the JD(U) and the RLD, the refusal of Mamata Banerjee and Bhagwant Mann to agree to a seat-sharing pact with the Congress in West Bengal and Punjab, and now the AAP’s offer of just one seat to the grand old party in Delhi. The AAP also announced a candidate each from Goa, and that too from a Congress stronghold, and Gujarat.
In a biting comment, AAP general secretary for organisation Sandeep Pathak on Tuesday said that “if we go by merit, the Congress does not deserve even a single seat to be reserved for it (in Delhi)”. Ouch! The AAP leader also claimed that seat-sharing talks had not yet taken place for over a month.
In the past, the Delhi Congress has expressed its opposition to a tie-up with the AAP but in the past several months those voices of dissent receded to the background as the top leadership of the two parties engaged with each other. Now that the AAP seems to be out of patience, whether those voices in the Congress return to the foreground or whether the party’s high command steps in to salvage the situation will be among the political stories to track on Wednesday and the rest of the week.
As things stand, at the moment a seat-sharing deal between INDIA parties is in place only in Tamil Nadu. But there, the tie-up between the DMK and the Congress precedes the coalition. Even in Maharashtra and Bihar, where there is a chance of a deal being worked out, the alliances in place precede the INDIA bloc. If the Congress and the Samajwadi Party (SP) reach an agreement, Uttar Pradesh will become the INDIA alliance’s first success story as far as a basic pact on constituencies is concerned. But even if there is an agreement in UP, questions are likely to be raised about what good the INDIA alliance experiment did if it could not help the Opposition parties break new ground in states where they had worked against each other earlier, and the Congress’s role in that failure.
What is happening in Odisha?
As the suspense continues over who the BJD will nominate for the third Rajya Sabha seat from Odisha, Union Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw is scheduled to arrive in Bhubaneswar on Wednesday on a two-day visit, reports PTI.
In 2019, though the BJP did not have the numbers in the Odisha Assembly, Vaishnaw went to the Rajya Sabha with the BJD’s backing after Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah requested Odisha CM Naveen Patnaik for his party’s support. With Vaishnaw’s candidature now coming to an end, there is speculation about whether the two parties will again arrive at an understanding to send the Union Minister back to the Upper House of Parliament. The BJD has the numbers to fill all three seats but till now has nominated only three-time former MLA Debashish Samantaray and Subhasish Khuntia, its young face from Puri.
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