On the last day of nominations to 57 vacant seats in the Rajya Sabha, the BJP on Tuesday queered the pitch for the Congress by backing two prominent media personalities — Subhash Chandra of Zee Group and Kartikeya Sharma of NewsX as independent candidates from Rajasthan and Haryana respectively.
Kartikeya, the son of former Congress leader Venod Sharma and incumbent Ambala Mayor Shakti Rani Sharma, is also the son-in-law of former Haryana speaker Kuldeep Sharma. While Venod Sharma is not in Congress, Kuldeep Sharma is a veteran Congressman.
Kartikeya’s entry could mean trouble for Congress nominee Ajay Maken in Haryana against whom there is also a resentment from a section of Congress MLAs who consider him an ‘outsider’.
On the other hand while Randeep Singh Surjewala and Mukul Wasnik are on safe wickets in Rajasthan, Pramod Tiwari could lose in case Subhash Chandra can manage the surplus votes of the BJP and also of some disgruntled Congress leaders, who have openly questioned the fielding of outsiders from the state and even the Independents.
Subhash Chandra contested the Rajya Sabha elections earlier as an independent candidate from Haryana in 2016 and won after 12 Congress votes were rejected due to the use of a different pen.
The BJP’s moves come even as resentment continued to pour in within the Congress over some candidatures like that of Imran Pratapgarhi from Maharashtra leading to Ashish Deshmukh, the MPCC general secretary, resigning from his post in protest.
Insiders said Congress chief Sonia Gandhi spoke over phone with senior party leader Ghulam Nabi Azad, the most notable omission in the nominations for the RS. From the BJP, sources said the party has different plans for Union Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi who has not been nominated.
Senior Congress leader and former CM Prithviraj Chavan, too, expressed displeasure over the decision to field Pratapgarhi from Maharashtra. Chavan said instead of the poet-politician, Congress veteran and former Union minister Mukul Wasnik, who hails from Maharashtra, should have been fielded from the state for the biennial polls to the Upper House from Rajasthan.
BJP announced 22 candidates for the polls including Union ministers Piyush Goyal, Nirmala Sitharaman. Eight BJP candidates filed their nominations in the presence of Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath. Those who filed nominations are the BJP's OBC Morcha national president K Laxman, former BJP state chief Laxmikant Vajpayee, Mithilesh Kumar, Radha Mohan Das Aggarwal, Surendra Singh Nagar, Baburam Nishad, Darshana Singh and Sangeeta Yadav.
Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, and actor-politician Jaggesh of the BJP, were among the prominent faces to file their nominations from Karnataka. JD(S) claimed that its patriarch former Prime Minister H D Deve Gowda had spoken to Congress President Sonia Gandhi, and she and other party leaders had consented to support its candidate.