The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Wednesday fielded its national president JP Nadda for Rajya Sabha elections from Gujarat and former chief minister and Congress turncoat Ashok Chavan from Maharashtra.
Ashok Chavan joined the BJP on Tuesday, a day after quitting the Congress.
The BJP’s latest list of candidates for the biennial Rajya Sabha polls has seven nominees — four for Gujarat and three for Maharashtra.
Currently, Nadda is a Rajya Sabha member from Himachal Pradesh but the BJP does not have the numbers to win the lone seat from the Congress-ruled state.
Amid a possibility that they may contest the upcoming Lok Sabha polls, Union ministers and outgoing Rajya Sabha members Mansukh Mandaviya and Parshottam Rupala, both from Gujarat, Dharmendra Pradhan from Odisha, and Narayan Rane from Maharashtra have not been renominated.
Earlier today, the BJP renominated Union ministers Ashwini Vaishnaw and L Murugan as its Rajya Sabha candidates from Odisha and Madhya Pradesh respectively.
Odisha Chief Minister and BJD president Naveen Patnaik has announced his party’s support to Vaishnaw in the upcoming Rajya Sabha polls, making his win a foregone conclusion. The BJD had supported his candidature in the Rajya Sabha bypoll from the state in 2019 as well.
The BJP on Sunday fielded Dharmsheela Gupta and Bhim Singh from Bihar and Raja Devendra Pratap Singh from Chhattisgarh.
Subhash Barala will contest from Haryana, Narayana Krishanasa Bhandage from Karnataka, Mahendra Bhatt from Uttarakhand and Samik Bhattacharya from West Bengal.
RPN Singh, Sudhanshu Trivedi, Chaudhary Tejveer Singh, Sadhna Singh, Amarpal Maurya, Sangita Balwant and Navin Jain will fight from Uttar Pradesh.
Elections for the 56 Rajya Sabha seats are scheduled to be held on February 27, and the last date for filing nominations is February 15.
Eight central ministers– Mansukh Mandaviya, Bhupender Yadav, Parshottam Rupala, Dharmendra Pradhan, V Murleedharan, Narayan Rane, Rajeev Chandrasekhar and Ashwini Vaishnaw, and former prime minister Manmohan Singh and BJP national president JP Nadda, will retire by the first week of May this year.
Speculations are that the retirement of these MPs and the outcome of the upcoming general elections will impact each party’s representation in the Upper House during the next Lok Sabha term.
(With agency inputs)
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Published: 14 Feb 2024, 04:05 PM IST