Patna, Mar 3 (PTI) BJP president Nitin Nabin is all set to enter Parliament with the party on Tuesday naming him as one of its two candidates from Bihar for the biennial Rajya Sabha elections.
Nabin, who currently holds the Bankipur assembly seat in the state, has been named along with Shivesh Kumar, a former MLA who had unsuccessfully contested the Sasaram Lok Sabha seat in the general elections held two years ago.
Nabin, 45, was catapulted to the top party post in January, when he replaced two-term national president and Union minister Jagat Prakash Nadda, in a surprise decision which is said to have signalled the rise of the “third generation leadership” in the BJP, which grew under the likes of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Lal Krishna Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi, and reached the pinnacle of success under Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah.
While the rise to prominence of Nabin, a Kayasth, could also be seen as the BJP’s attempt to assure its core base of upper castes that they will get a good share despite being numerically small, the choice of Shivesh Kumar can be seen as part of the party’s Dalit outreach.
The name of Nabin as a possible candidate from Bihar had been doing the rounds ever since the Rajya Sabha elections were announced a few weeks ago.
Speculations were rife that for the other seat, the party might consider Bhojpuri superstar Pawan Singh, who turned down the BJP ticket in 2024 from the Asansol Lok Sabha seat in West Bengal and contested as an Independent from Karakat in Bihar, thereby spoiling the chances of the NDA candidate there.
Soon after the announcements came from the BJP’s national headquarters in Delhi, state BJP president Sanjay Saraogi said here, “It is a matter of pride for Bihar that Shri Nitin Nabin will represent his home state in the Rajya Sabha”.
“Both Nitin Nabin and Shivesh Kumar will file their nomination papers on March 5. Rashtriya Lok Morcha president Upendra Kushwaha will also file his nomination papers on the same day,” added Saraogi.
The statement put paid to rumours in a section of the media here that Kushwaha, whose party is the smallest NDA partner in Bihar, with four MLAs and no MP in Lok Sabha, has been asked to merge the RLM with the BJP.
A former Union minister who failed to win Karakat in the 2024 general elections because of Pawan Singh’s rebellion, Kushwaha got elected to the Upper House shortly afterwards from a seat that fell vacant upon BJP’s Vivek Thakur entering the Lok Sabha from Nawada.
Elections are due in Bihar for five Rajya Sabha seats, and although none of these was held by the BJP, the party, with 89 MLAs in the 243-member assembly, has more than the required strength for getting two MPs elected to the Upper House from the state.
Two of the remaining seats are to be contested by Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s JD(U), which is understood to have made up its mind to consider Ram Nath Thakur, a Union minister and son of Bharat Ratna Karpoori Thakur, for a third consecutive term.
The JD(U) seems to have decided not to give a ticket this time to journalist-turned-politician Harivansh Narayan Singh, who has been the Rajya Sabha Deputy Chairman since 2020. Speculations are rife that the other JD(U) candidate could be Nishant, the son of Nitish Kumar, whose political entry will be formally announced in a couple of days.
Meanwhile, the RJD, the main opposition party in Bihar, has made it clear that it will contest one of the five Rajya Sabha seats, throwing a spanner in the NDA’s hopes of making a clean sweep, by virtue of its brute majority in the state assembly.
The opposition party, which is yet to announce its candidate, hopes to get support from the AIMIM, which has five MLAs, besides the lone BSP legislator, though neither of the two parties has, so far, publicly promised to back the RJD. PTI NAC NN
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