Congress MP from Sultanpur, Sanjay Singh is set to be the BJP’s candidate against Rahul Gandhi in Amethi. A descendent of the erstwhile royal family of Amethi, Singh has been sulking for a while over his marginalisation within the Congress.
Party sources confirmed to The Pioneer that Singh could join the party ‘any moment’, and BJP chief Rajnath Singh plans to field him against the Congress vice-president in the pocket borough of the Nehru-Gandhi family.
“We have been in touch for quite some time now. The deliberations are in the last lap,” sources said. After this, BJP general secretary and Pilibhit MP, Varun Gandhi will move to Sultanpur lok Sabha, which was part of the erstwhile Amethi parliamentary constituency once represented by his father, the late Sanjay Gandhi.
Speculation about Sanjay Singh’s return to the BJP gained momentum when he shared the dais with local BJP leaders during a function at Amethi on Tuesday.
“I have not quit politics. Everything will be clear once the list of candidates for the lok Sabha polls is released by political parties,” he told reporters on the possibilities of joining the BJP. Sources claim Singh wanted an assurance from the BJP about getting a Rajya Sabha berth if he lost the battle against the formidable Gandhi scion. The BJP has reportedly assured Sanjay Singh that it would ‘sympathetically consider’ his demand.
Ten Rajya Sabha berths from Uttar Pradesh will fall vacant in November 2014, and given its present strength, the BJP can get just one seat currently held by Kusum Rai. The next lot of ten Rajya Sabha vacancies from Uttar Pradesh would be created in July 2016. Singh has been a loyalist of the Nehru-Gandhi family since the days of Sanjay Gandhi, but took a political detour to spend days in Janata Dal and the BJP before returning to the Congress on the eve of the 2004 parliamentary elections.
Singh switched over to the Janata Dal in 1988 and unsuccessfully challenged Rajiv Gandhi in Amethi. He then crossed over to the BJP and defeated Captain Satish Sharma, another loyalist of the Nehru-Gandhi family in Amethi with a margin of 23,270 votes in the 1998 election.
Singh’s stint as a lok Sabha MP was short-lived as Parliament was dissolved. In the subsequent general election held in 1999, Singh lost the Amethi lok Sabha seat to Congress chief Sonia Gandhi by a margin of over 3,00,000 votes.
Singh returned to the Congress in 2003 and won Sultanpur lok Sabha seat as a Congress candidate in 2009, defeating sitting MP Mohammad Tahir of the BSP by 98,779 votes.