Reliance hand gets SP RS ticket
The Samajwadi Party’s (SP) choice to send 40-year-old Dhanraj Parimal Nathwani, Group President at Reliance Industries, to the Rajya Sabha from Uttar Pradesh is not a typical House appointment. Five months before Uttar Pradesh votes in February-March 2027, Nathwani’s appointment is a calculated break from SP’s usual social-justice roster.
Dhanraj also oversees the Jamnagar manufacturing divisions and exercises strategic oversight over the Jio business in Gujarat. Besides, he leads the engineering, procurement and construction vertical and oversees Reliance Jio Defence System Limited.
He also serves as vice chairperson of the Dwarkadhish Temple Administrative Committee, holds memberships of the Nathdwara Temple Board and the Gujarat State Board for Wildlife and is the president of the Gujarat Cricket Association, which runs the Narendra Modi Stadium. He has no UP cadre, no assembly base and no history in SP factional politics.
His father, Parimal Nathwani, is a long-time Reliance corporate-affairs hand and an NDA-backed Independent Rajya Sabha MP from Jharkhand, now in a fourth term. If Dhanraj is elected on 16 October, father and son will sit in the same House from rival political camps.
The SP already had the numbers, with Congress support, for two safe seats. Ram Gopal Yadav was the expected name. Nathwani was the surprise Akhilesh had advertised.
The party framed it as “new generation, new thinking” and a bridge to industry. In plain terms, Akhilesh is trying to stop the BJP from monopolising the language of investment, infrastructure, and professional competence in a State where Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has made setting up new factory announcements a political weapon.
The nomination does three things at once. First, it signals that big capital is not treating SP as radioactive. That a family embedded in India’s largest private conglomerate is willing to accept an SP ticket weakens the charge that an Akhilesh-led Government would be anti-business by default. Second, it gives SP a Delhi-based networker for six years, useful for fundraising, corporate access and policy talk that a traditional party organiser cannot promise. Third, it slightly blurs SP’s image as only a PDA machine. A London-educated Gujarati industrialist who runs cricket and temple bodies is not the usual SP export.
The upcoming UP election will centre on jobs, industry, law and order, and social issues. By bringing a corporate leader into Parliament now, Akhilesh is buying time, connecting with wealthy circles, and creating a reason to focus on development.
The costs are obvious. Om Prakash Rajbhar’s jibe that Akhilesh Yadav’s PDA now means family, the wealthy and the rest will be repeated. Asaduddin Owaisi, who leads AIMIM, has already asked why the father sits with the NDA and the son with SP. Cadre workers who sell land rights, reservation and minority security will ask what a Jamnagar executive does for them. An outsider with no UP roots can look like a ‘managed seat’. The optics of an Ambani lieutenant in a party that still campaigns against crony capitalism will be used relentlessly through the 2027 campaign.
