Decoding Congress's Rajya Sabha list – clear stamp of both Rahul and Priyanka

The Congress party's list of Rajya Sabha candidates is out and there are quite a few surprises.

First of all, two senior leaders and prime movers of the group of 23 dissenters or G-23 Ghulam Nabi Azad and Anand Sharma have once again been denied the nomination.

There were strong indications that Azad might be fielded from Jharkhand and Sharma from Rajasthan.

In Azad's case, the ruling Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) and chief minister Hemant Soren were willing to leave the seat for him and had conveyed the same to Congress president Sonia Gandhi during their meeting on Saturday.

However, it is said that Azad refused the offer. Probably, Azad apprehended backlash within the party if he accepted the offer. He would have faced the criticism that the G-23 was formed to protect their interests rather than initiate a process to strengthen the party.

Soren finally announced Mahua Manjhi as his party's candidate.

In Rajasthan, the Congress leadership could have easily nominated Sharma since the party had the numbers to win three seats. Again, it seemed uninterested in Sharma and instead named Randeep Singh Surjewala, Pramod Tiwari and Mukul Wasnik from the desert state.

Another dissenter and senior lawyer Vivek Tankha has been nominated from Madhya Pradesh.

So, the Congress high command was very clear. It never wanted to accommodate Azad and Sharma to send a strong message while being soft on a few other dissidents.

With most vocal so-called change seeker Kapil Sibal having left the Congress and Wasnik, Tankha and former Haryana chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda back in the good books of the Gandhi family, the G-23 virtually stands disbanded.

Unless of course, Azad and Sharma along with Manish Tewari and Shashi Tharoor infuse fresh life into it. It will be interesting to see their next move.

But some nominations have received much flak from party workers.

For example, poet-turned-politician Imran Pratapgarhi. He joined the Congress in 2019 just before the Lok Sabha elections. Pratapgarhi contested and lost to Samajwadi Party's ST Hasan from Moradabad.

In June 2021, he was appointed chairman of the party's minority department. And within a year, Pratapgarhi, 34, has secured a seat in the House of Elders (Rajya Sabha).

His nomination triggered some discontentment within Congress. Pawan Khera and Nagma Morarji openly expressed their disappointment for not being considered in place of this recent entrant.

The other interesting nomination is that of Rajeev Shukla. Considered close to Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, Shukla has been fielded from Chhattisgarh along with Bihar leader Ranjeet Ranjan, the wife of former RJD leader Rajesh Ranjan alias Pappu Yadav.

Shukla is known to be friends with some top BJP leaders and also the corporate world. In fact, some Congress leaders from Himachal Pradesh had flagged his close ties with union minister Anurag Thakur and home minister Amit Shah's son Jay Shah. The three are involved in the cricket management in the country.

Shukla, 62, is the vice-president of the cash-rich Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) and the chairman of the Indian Premier League (IPL).

Apart from Pratapgarhi and Shukla, Pramod Tiwari is the third Congress leader from Uttar Pradesh to get the Rajya Sabha nomination.

The grand old party managed to win just two of the total 403 seats it contested in the recent assembly elections in the country's most populous and politically important state.

The other interesting fact is that while Wasnik, who hails from Maharashtra, has been nominated from Rajasthan, Surjewala, a resident of Haryana, is the Congress nominee from Rajasthan.

From Haryana, the party has named Delhi leader and a prominent Punjabi face Ajay Maken. Apparently, Hooda had raised some objections to the names of Surjewala and Kumari Selja, claiming that the possibility of cross-voting in the case of local candidates cannot be ruled out. He later gave his stamp of approval to Maken's name.

Evidently, Rajasthan chief minister Ashok Gehlot and his Chhattisgarh counterpart Bhupesh Baghel seemed to have no say in the selection of candidates and the names were finalised by Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi given that their imprint is quite visible in the list.

Former union ministers P Chidambaram and Jairam Ramesh have been renominated to the Upper House of Parliament, a move that went against a norm set at the three-day Chintan Shivir at Udaipur in Rajasthan earlier this month.

According to this rule that became a part of the Udaipur declaration, there will be a limit of five years for a person to hold any post. Clearly, this norm has gone for a toss.

While Chidambaram has been nominated from Tamil Nadu, Ramesh is the party candidate from Karnataka.

Polling will be held for 57 seats spread across 15 states on June 10 and the results will be out the same day. The Congress is set to win 10 seats while the BJP will bag 22 seats.