BJP names 9 RS nominees from 8 states
NEW DELHI: The BJP on Tuesday declared nine candidates for the Rajya Sabha by-elections from eight states. Prominent among them are two ministers of states in the Modi cabinet while one is a former president of the bar council and senior Supreme Court lawyer from Bihar.
The by-elections are due on September 3. Union ministers Ravneet Singh Bittu (Rlys MoS) has been fielded from Rajasthan while George Kurian (MoS Animal Husbandry), has been fielded from Madhya Pradesh.
Bittu is currently serving as Union minister of state railways & Food Processing Industries. He quit Congress and joined the BJP ahead of the Lok Sabha polls this year.
Union minister for state George Kurian has been fielded from a vacancy created after Jyotiraditya Scindia was elected to Lok Sabha in 2024 from Guna seat. Kurian belongs to Kerala and has been with BJP from 1980.
The BJP has also fielded former BJD leader Mamata Mohanta from Odisha and ex-Congress leader Kiran Choudhary from Haryana. Both these leaders joined the BJP recently and were expected to be nominated for the Upper House.
A former Haryana minister and MLA from Tosham, Choudhary, 69, joined the BJP along with her daughter Shruti and their supporters in June.
According to BJP’s list of nine candidates, Manan Kumar Mishra is a senior advocate in the Supreme Court and chairman of the Bar Council of India. He has been fielded form Bihar while Dhairyashil Patil from Maharashtra and Rajib Bhattacharjee from Tripura.
As per the NDA’s seat-sharing formula for Bihar in the Lok Sabha polls, Kushwaha’s party was to get a seat in Parliament and another berth in the state legislative council.
Kushwaha contested the Karakat seat, which he had won for the NDA in 2014, but finished third behind Raja Ram Kushwaha of CPI(ML), who won, and Pawan Singh who was the runner-up.
Maharashtra is one of the four poll-bound states, which is scheduled to go to the polls this year. Battacharjee is the president of the BJP’s Tripura unit. The party’s central leadership, marinating social engineering in the selection of candidates has also fielded Ranjan Das and former Union minister Rameswar Teli as its candidates from Assam.
This time, elections for 12 vacant Rajya Sabha seats will be held on September 3 after ten of these seats fell vacant as the sitting members, including Union ministers Piyush Goyal, Sarbananda Sonowal and Jyotiraditya Scindia, were elected to the Lok Sabha.