House-proud MPs: RS elections have a lot of intricate politics behind them

Some big guns have been silenced but new ones will roar. In the monsoon session of Parliament, new faces will be seen in the Rajya Sabha, while many old ones will be absent. The politics around the new nominees, those who have been nominated for another term and those who have been dropped, is complex and involved.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has an unwritten rule: That an MP who has served three terms will not be sent to the Rajya Sabha again. Former Union Minister Prakash Javadekar, who had completed three terms from Maharashtra and has bowed out, may feel injustice was done to him, especially because there have been exceptions to the rule. Jaswant Singh, former Union minister for external affairs, defence, and finance, was nominated for four terms. So was Arun Jaitley, and the BJP took the unprecedented decision of fielding him for Rajya Sabha election after he had lost a Lok Sabha election. Vice-President M Venkaiah Naidu is in his fourth term, which ends in July. Former telecom minister Ravishankar Prasad is also in his fourth term, which will end in 2024.

The BJP has dropped Vinay Sahasrabuddhe and Shiv Pratap Shukla. They completed one term each. But while Sahasrabuddhe is heading the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR), the reasons for dropping Shukla appear to be political: For years, Shukla, who belongs to Gorakhpur, has been at loggerheads with Yogi Adityanath, going back to the time before the latter became UP chief minister. In the 2002 Assembly election in UP, the confrontation spilled out into the open when Adityanath proposed Radhamohan Das Agarwal as the candidate but the BJP insisted on fielding Shukla, arguing that he had won the Assembly seat four times and had been cabinet minister in BJP governments in UP thrice. Adityanath then had to display his might and control over Gorakhpur and fielded Agarwal as his candidate — from his erstwhile party, the Hindu Mahasabha — against Shukla. Agarwal was elected and Shukla slid to third place. To placate him, the Modi regime made him a Rajya Sabha member in 2016 and also gave him the job of minister of state. Dropping him from both positions indicates the ascendency — and the hand — of Yogi Adityanath.

Dropping Minority Affairs Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi from the Rajya Sabha is probably a precursor to fielding him from the Rampur Lok Sabha constituency by-election against Azam Khan. Rampur is Naqvi’s earlier Lok Sabha constituency and his victory will be a test for Adityanath as well as a challenge for Naqvi himself.

In Rajasthan, the BJP has named Ghanshyam Tiwari, a six-time MLA and a vocal critic of former chief minister and party Vice-President Vasundhara Raje, as a nominee. So critical was he of Raje when she was chief minister that he left the party during the 2018 Assembly polls and formed his own outfit. For a short period, he joined hands with the Congress too, but returned to the fold after being persuaded to do so by BJP leaders. Tiwari has an RSS background with over 45 years’ experience in politics. That he has been nominated to the upper house could also mean that his absence from state politics will, in fact, strengthen the Raje faction in the BJP in Rajasthan.

Somewhat similar politics is evident in the Congress, where Anand Sharma and Ghulam Nabi Azad have been dropped, and, in their stead, Rajiv Shukla, who is active in the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), has been nominated (he has won unopposed). Vivek Tankha, who too has won unopposed, claims he is the only Kashmiri Pandit MP in the house. He has the backing of former MP chief minister Kamal Nath.

However, the one exit from the Rajya Sabha that stands out is that of RCP Singh, former IAS officer and once the right-hand man of Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar. Singh, a fellow Kurmi, also ran the Janata Dal (United), or JD(U), for some time before he was made minister (of steel) in the Union cabinet. He has six months to become a member of either house, or else he loses ministership. The BJP has no real difficulty in backing him and getting him to quit his party and join the BJP. But the party is chary of rocking the alliance boat in Bihar, where it is a partner in government with the JD(U). In a way, Nitish Kumar is daring the BJP to act: If it claims RCP Singh as one of its own, he could retaliate. He has already asserted himself by forcing the state BJP to back a caste census, even though as a party, it is not especially enthused by the idea of a census that maps voters on the basis of caste.

The results of the Rajya Sabha election will come out on June 10. But the politics will continue well after that.