New Delhi: Of the 16 names announced by the BJP so far for the 27 February Rajya Sabha election, 15 are new faces, while 10 are relatively unknown ground workers.
But this isn’t unusual. Over the past 10 years, the BJP’s selection process for Rajya Sabha candidates has changed completely.
During the Vajpayee-Advani era, the BJP was known to elevate to the Rajya Sabha mass leaders who would lose Lok Sabha elections, or those who helped the party through their intellectual work, were influential as poll managers, or served as BJP ideologues.
The Rajya Sabha MPs at the time included the likes of Arun Shourie, Yashwant Sinha, Chandan Mitra and Balbir Punj, who represented the intellectual side of the party.
Arun Jaitley, Pramod Mahajan, Jaswant Singh and Sinha shaped the party’s strategy on the floor of the House and outside Parliament, while mass leaders like Keshubhai Patel, Rajnath Singh, Shanta Kumar, Bhagat Singh Koshyari, Shatrughan Sinha, and C.P. Thakur were accommodated in the Upper House when they lost the Lok Sabha elections or were on the verge of retirement.
PM Narendra Modi, meanwhile, is trying to bring in leaders who are young and evolving as future leaders of the party, and working for the organisation in the grassroots. The selection is also aimed at helping the BJP’s social engineering and caste arithmetic, and thus its expansion plans — so even those who are not mass leaders, and are unable to get elected in assembly or Lok Sabha polls, make the cut.
There is also a reluctance — although unstated — to give more than two terms to anyone.
Fifty-six seats are due to be filled in the upcoming elections.
The BJP’s list so far includes just one repetition: Sudhanshu Trivedi, who is seen by the party as having done a good job as MP and BJP spokesperson. This will be his second term.
Apart from him, five others on the list of 16 are known, experienced leaders: Former Union minister R.P.N. Singh, who joined the BJP before the 2022 assembly polls in Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand BJP chief Mahendra Bhatt, former Haryana party chief Subhash Barala, Bheem Singh, a former associate of former Bihar CMs Karpoori Thakur and Nitish Kumar, and three-time former MP Chaudhary Tejveer Singh from Uttar Pradesh.
The others are mostly footsoldiers of the party, going down to the district or mandal levels, from Sangeeta Balwant, a former minister in the Yogi Adityanath government who was elected from the Ghazipur assembly seat in 2017 but lost in 2022, in UP, to Dharmshila Gupta, who lost the mayoral election for Darbhanga, and has never contested an assembly election, in Bihar.
While some Vajpayee-era leaders, speaking off the record, have questioned the new selection process, the newer candidates said Modi had opened the Rajya Sabha’s doors to grassroots leaders.
Other leaders noted that the change reflected the electoral strength of the Modi dispensation, which doesn’t face the same challenges as leaders who helmed the party earlier.
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New names
The BJP’s RS picks for Uttar Pradesh include Amarpal Maurya, a general secretary in the state unit who hails from the OBC Maurya community, influential in eastern UP. He lost the 2022 assembly poll from Raibareli’s Unchahar seat.
Sangeeta Balwant, meanwhile, belongs to the extremely backward classes (EBC) community, and is a member of the Bind caste, which has a significant population in Ghazipur and neighbouring districts.
The selection of Balwant, who is known to be close to Jammu & Kashmir Lt Governor Manoj Sinha, is also in line with the BJP’s outreach to women voters.
So is the choice of Sadhana Singh, another one-time MLA who started her career in the BJP in 1993 and has held several posts at the district level as the women’s morcha chief for Chandauli. She became an MLA from Mughal Sarai in 2017. While she was denied a ticket in 2022, she kept working for the party.
Another candidate is former Agra mayor Navin Jain, who has served as UP BJP treasurer. He declared assets to the tune of Rs 400 crore during the 2018 Agra mayoral polls. He has also served as director in PNC Infratech, with stakes in road and highway construction.
Dharmshila Gupta, up for a Rajya Sabha seat from Bihar, rose from the district level to become the women’s morcha chief of the party in the state.
In Bengal, the BJP’s pick is Samik Bhattarcharya, a party spokesperson. The Chhattisgarh candidate is Devendra Pratap Singh, who belongs to the Raigarh dynasty but has never fought an assembly or Lok Sabha election. He is a district panchayat member, and has carved his niche with his association with the RSS’ Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram and role in its ‘ghar wapsi’ agitation.
Speaking to ThePrint, Balwant said she “never imagined” that she would be sent to the Rajya Sabha, as the “Upper House is considered a place for elite, educated, intellectual leaders”.
“But Modi ji has changed the practice to nominate grassroots leaders,” she added.
Dharmshila Gupta said “she was busy with a party programme in Bhagalpur when one of my colleagues from Patna called me to inform me”.
“I thought they were joking,” she added. “I said, don’t make a fool of me and cut the call. But when other members from the party office started calling, followed by Nityanand Rai and Sushil Modi, I got convinced.”
She said it was only under Modi that someone like her, “who has not even contested an assembly election, can get a Rajya Sabha nomination”.
Devendra Pratap said he never thought he would be chosen as a candidate for the Upper House.
“I was (former Union minister) Dilip Singh Judeo’s associate. I was trying to get a Lok Sabha ticket in 2019, after current chief minister Vishnu Deo Sai was denied one, but I did not get it,” he added.
How Modi changed Rajya Sabha
In 2020, the then Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan called Sumer Singh Solanki, an assistant professor of history at a college in the remote district of Barwani, to inform him that he had been selected as a Rajya Sabha candidate.
The news stunned not just Solanki, who was not even a party member, but the entire Madhya Pradesh BJP unit, which, sources said, had to spend one hour to find out who Solanki was.
According to BJP sources, Solanki was selected directly by the BJP high command in Delhi on account of his years of work with the tribals, and his anti-drug-addiction effort across 500 villages. He had also been involved in water conservation initiatives, and had received several awards from the state government.
Two years later, when the term of Gopal Narayan Singh — who has several educational institutes, including medical colleges, and has served as state BJP president — ended, the party decided to replace him with Shambu Sharan Patel, a state secretary in the Bihar unit, mostly unknown at the time.
This decision, sources said, was aimed at denting the Kurmi vote bank of Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, who has since returned to the NDA fold.
Dhanuk, the caste represented by Patel, was also seen as under-represented in the BJP by the party.
Other choices in line with Modi’s new template include Baburam Nishad, Sumitra Valmiki, Jai Prakash Nishad, Ram Shakal, Sakaldeep Rajbhar, Kanta Kardam, Kavita Patidar, Sangeeta Yadav, Geeta Shakya, and Kalpana Saini.
Jai Prakash Nishad, who was elected to the assembly on a BSP ticket in 2012 but joined the BJP in 2018 after a brief stint in the SP, was chosen for the Rajya Sabha in 2020 because the Nishad community constitutes an estimated 18 percent of UP’s population.
Kardam was meant to give the BJP a foothold among the Jatavs, who are considered a key votebank of the BSP and its chief Mayawati.
Shakya, who has served as district BJP president for Etawah, is a former SP leader who contested the 2012 assembly polls. One of the few women leaders of the OBC Shakya community in UP, her selection in 2020 was seen as a means to make inroads in Etawah, the stronghold of SP chief Akhilesh Yadav.
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Then vs now
Speaking to ThePrint, a BJP leader said the “basic difference in the approach of Modi and Vajpayee-Advani was political circumstances and the different challenges before the party”.
Referring to the late Capt Jai Narayan Nishad, a prominent leader of the community in Bihar, and Hukmdev Narayan Yadav, a popular farm leader from the Yadav OBC community in the state, the leader said they “were big personalities in the state who rose through a natural process and were given due respect in the Rajya Sabha after retirement”.
But Modi, the leader said, “is picking young faces who are not big leaders”. “They have no intellectual capacity like Shourie or Sinha, but hold influence in one district, not even across a state.”
The leader said Modi “believes in politics of symbolism to expand the party footprint”. “He is the biggest influencer. He doesn’t need anyone to shape the party ideology… but he needs micro caste leaders for expansion and he is doing that.”
BJP sources said the party doesn’t face electoral vulnerability under Modi, which renders the earlier selection criteria redundant.
Prabhat Jha, the editor of BJP mouthpiece Kamal Sandesh who served as Madhya Pradesh BJP president, and got two terms in the Rajya Sabha from 2008-2020, said, “When Vajapyee lost the Gwalior election against Madhav Rao Scindia in 1984, it was the need of the hour to send him to the Rajya Sabha to lead the party. Similarly, Advani and (Musli Manohar) Joshi came into the Rajya Sabha when the Lok Sabha option was not feasible.”
However, he added, “they (Vajpayee-Advani) in their time also brought talent into the Rajya Sabha, keeping party interest in mind”.
“Circumstances were different then,” he said. “Today, the BJP is at its peak. So, Prime Minister Modi is making ‘sarv samaveshi (inclusive) samaj’, keeping in mind the electoral prospects and expansion of the party to new heights.”
Another difference in their approach is the undeclared norm under Modi to not give more than two terms to any member, and asking Union ministers to contest Lok Sabha polls rather than sitting in the Upper House. Modi did not even repeat Om Mathur, a close friend of the PM since his pracharak days who was in charge of Gujarat during his chief minister days.
In the upcoming election, Bhupender Yadav has been denied a seat from Rajasthan, and Rajeev Chandrasekhar from Karnataka, and they have been asked to contest the Lok Sabha polls instead.
While Prakash Javadekar, Piyush Goyal, Parshottam Rupala and Nirmala Sitharaman are in their third terms, most of them got their first two stints during the Advani-Rajnath era. They have also been asked to aim for direct election to Parliament.
Earlier, senior leaders like Pramod Mahajan, Arun Jaitley and Jaswant Singh have served four terms in the Upper House.
Balbir Punj said the “party earlier sent to the RS leaders who make contributions as intellectuals to expand the party footprint and ideology, and form policy on the floor of house and outside”.
“In Atal ji’s time, it was not easier to nominate diverse kinds of people but today such restrictions are not there. The bandwidth is so huge that Modi can experiment by inducting diverse kinds of people to expand footprint.”
However, a Vajpayee-era Union minister criticised the new selection process, saying Modi is “using the Bharat Ratna to expand the party’s electoral footprint”.
“Modi has not promoted intellectual capital in the Rajya Sabha, unlike Vajpayee. He has promoted mediocre talent in the Upper House. He has made the Rajya Sabha another Lok Sabha to expand the party’s electoral footprint,” he added.
“In ten years, none of his selected grassroots leaders will be cultivated as leaders or intellectuals, except one or two.”
Modi’s RS appointees also include leaders who have been given the position as a consolation prize after being denied assembly/Lok Sabha tickets.
These include Madan Rathore, two-time former MLA from Rajasthan who was denied a ticket in the 2023 assembly polls and was said to be on the verge of rebelling. He is among the new RS candidates.
Chunnilal Garasiya, a former MLA and known tribal face who was appointed as election in-charge in Gujarat’s tribal districts and has been a ticket aspirant for two decades, is up for a Rajya Sabha seat from Rajasthan.
Modi has also been known to reward spokespersons with RS seats — apart from Trivedi, this includes Anil Baluni and G.V.L. Narasimha Rao, whose terms end this year, and former MP Syed Zafar Islam.
Talking about this practice, a BJP leader said spokespersons “work day and night defending the party and propagating party ideology”.
Another practice under Modi is to avoid sending businessmen to the Upper House from the party quota, a factor that has created differences in the party before. The PM, it is learnt, wants to reserve any such selections to the nominated category. One example is Chandigarh University owner Satnam Singh Sandhu, key to Modi’s Sikh outreach.
(Edited by Sunanda Ranjan)
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