NEW DELHI: Union ministers Ravneet Singh Bittu and George Kurian do not figure among the 11 Rajya Sabha candidates named by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for the June 18 polls, a development that adds to the buzz about a reshuffle in the council of ministers.
Kurian, the only Christian minister in the Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led government, and Bittu are outgoing MPs from Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan respectively and did not find a place in the list from their state. The buzz over the reshuffle has now further grown as two other junior ministers, Pankaj Chaudhary and Harsh Malhotra, have already been vested with organisational responsibilities. Chaudhary is the Uttar Pradesh BJP president while Malhotra was recently made head of the Delhi BJP. None of the outgoing Rajya Sabha MPs has been renominated.
In 2022, Cabinet ministers Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi and R C P Singh had quit before their Rajya Sabha term was over and later were not renominated to the House. Similarly, this time, the governing party did not repeat any of the outgoing Rajya Sabha MPs. A number of organisational functionaries, including national general secretary Tarun Chugh and BJP’s former Rajasthan state president Satish Poonia, have been picked for their likely debut as parliamentarians.
BJP is yet to name its candidates from Jharkhand and Karnataka, where it is guaranteed one seat each, keeping open the possibility that it can yet renominate either of the two ministers. The two ministers can retain their office for six months in case they are no longer MPs after their term ends on June 21.
An overhaul of BJP’s team of national office-bearers is also due after Nitin Nabin took over as the party president in January and has been rather active since, touring across states to gather feedback and tone up its organisational machinery.
Among the Rajya Sabha candidates, BJP has named its state president A Sharda Devi from Manipur and former state chief Tai Tagak from Arunachal Pradesh. From Gujarat, it has picked four new faces, including three relatively young functionaries — Rajubhai Shukla, Mukeshbhai Rathwa, Mansingh Parmar and Jitendra Kanzariya — with a focus on Other Backward Classes (OBC) and tribal communities.
After appointing a Jat Sikh — Kewal Singh Dhillon — as its Punjab president to reach out to his community, not seen as the party’s core voters, BJP’s Rajya Sabha choice of Chugh caters to its traditional voters in the state, where polls are due early next year. The decision not to renominate Bittu, also a Jat Sikh and grandson of former Chief Minister Beant Singh, has surprised political circles, but there is a view that he may be asked to focus on the coming polls. Kurian, a seasoned BJP member from Kerala, lost in the assembly poll held recently in the state.
In Rajasthan, where Congress has been active organisationally, the governing BJP has sought to appeal to two numerically strong OBC communities. Debashish Samantaray, who had quit the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) to join BJP, has been fielded for the Odisha bypoll, triggered by his resignation from the House.
Outgoing BJP MPs include Rambhai Mokariya, Amin Narhari and Ramila Bara from Gujarat, Leishemba Sanajaoba from Manipur, Rajendra Gehlot from Rajasthan, Nabam Rebia from Arunachal and Sumer Singh Solanki from Madhya Pradesh.
BJP is all but certain to seal all 10 seats — four from Gujarat, two each from Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, and one each from Manipur and Arunachal Pradesh — besides the lone bypoll seat from Odisha due to its numerical strength. It is in office in all these states. Elections to 24 seats and bypolls to one are due on June 8.
