G-23 leaders or change seekers Ghulam Nabi Azad and Anand Sharma failed to get tickets from seven states where Congress could win ten Rajya Sabha seats as the leadership on Sunday night announced a list of candidates that is packed with Gandhi loyalists.
The announcement is likely to create ripples in the party, especially due to the exclusion of the G-23 leaders, and except for two candidates, none of the candidates hail from the state where they are fighting Rajya Sabha elections on June 10. Not a single candidate chosen from Rajasthan, which will go to polls next year, is a native.
The selection of candidates and the states assigned to them appears to emphasise the internal troubles in their respective states. It also showed that the Congress leadership was keen to accommodate leaders considered close to Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi.
There was speculation that Azad would be fielded from either Maharashtra or Rajasthan while Sharma was likely to get a seat in Haryana, especially after they found space in the newly formed Political Affairs Committee headed by party chief Sonia Gandhi. It is now to be seen whether the party manages to convince JMM for a seat in Jharkhand and fields either Azad or Sharma.
Among the sitting MPs, Rajya Sabha Chief Whip Jairam Ramesh and Vivek Tankha were renominated from Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh respectively while former Finance Minister P Chidambaram was shifted from Maharashtra to his home state Tamil Nadu while Chhattisgarh MP Chhaya Verma was denied a seat despite Congress could win two seats.
Congress is fielding Rajiv Shukla, who hails from Uttar Pradesh, and Ranjeet Ranjan, a former MP from Bihar, from Chhattisgarh where Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel had demanded that Priyanka Gandhi should be fielded.
From Rajasthan, the Congress is fielding General Secretary Mukul Wasnik, who signed the letter along with other G-23 leaders seeking clarity on leadership but of late distanced himself from the grouping, party chief spokesperson Randeep Surjewala and former MP Pramod Tiwari.
None of them belong to Rajasthan. It was interesting that Wasnik, a Maharashtrian, was not fielded from his home state despite the Congress being able to get one seat, as it chose its Minority Department head and UP leader Imran Pratapgarhi as the candidate. Similar is the case with Surjewala, who is from Haryana. Tiwari hails from UP.
In Haryana, the Congress has chosen General Secretary Ajay Maken, a former Delhi Congress president and ex-Union Minister. Kumari Selja, who is considered close to Sonia Gandhi and had lost her Haryana Congress presidentship in the internal fight to Bhupinder Singh Hooda-led faction, was also lobbying for the seat.
Like Wasnik, Tankha had also signed the letter sent by G-23 leaders but his closeness to Digvijaya Singh and his low-profile in the grouping helped him.