Lok Sabha polls: In third list, Congress bets heavily on party stalwarts’ kin

In its third list of candidates for the Lok Sabha polls, released late Thursday (March 21) night, the Congress has bet heavily on relatives of party stalwarts, as well as incumbent legislators, even as several of its top-rung leaders, including president Mallikarjun Kharge and his predecessor Sonia Gandhi, have decided to opt out of the electoral fight. The third list of 56 candidates also indicates that while the Congress party is expanding its alliance in Rajasthan, finalising its seat-sharing deals with existing INDIA partners in Maharashtra, Bihar and Bengal continues to face hurdles.

With the 56 candidates declared on March 21, the party has now announced its nominees for 138 of the nearly 300 seats it plans to contest in the upcoming seven phase polls, which are scheduled to begin on April 19. The third list features candidates from both of Arunachal Pradesh’s constituencies, 11 names from Gujarat, 17 nominees from Karnataka, seven from Maharashtra, six from Rajasthan, the lone seat from Pondicherry, five candidates from Telangana and eight candidates from Bengal, where the party is still negotiating an alliance with the Left Front.

Sitting MPs picked again

Continuing the pattern seen in the earlier two list of party candidates, the Congress has reposed faith on two of its sitting MPs — Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury from Baharampur in Bengal and Ve Vaithilingam from Pondicherry — while in Malda South, the third constituency featured on the list that is presently held by the party, the Congress has fielded Isha Khan Chowdhury, son of sitting MP Abu Hashem Khan Choudhury.

The list ends the suspense on Kharge’s possible candidature in the upcoming polls as the party has fielded his son-in-law Radhakrishnan Doddamani from Karnataka’s Gulbarga seat. The Federal had reported, on March 9, that while Kharge, a two-term ex-Lok Sabha MP from Gulbarga and former nine-term legislator from Gurmitkal in Gulbarga, wanted several of the party’s senior leaders to face the hustings, he wasn’t keen on doing so himself; ostensibly to be left free for canvassing for his party.

Notably, Doddamani isn’t the only relative of a Congress leader to feature in Thursday’s list. Besides Abu Hashem Khan Chowdhury’s son in Malda South and Kharge’s son-in-law in Gulbarga, the list also features children of at least five Karnataka Cabinet ministers and relatives of several sitting and former MPs and MLAs.

Familiar families

Priyanka Jarkiholi (Chikkodi) and Sagar Khandre (Bidar), the daughter and son of Karnataka ministers Satish Jarkiholi and Eshwar Khandre, respectively, have got tickets as have Mrunal Hebbalkar (Belgaum), Sowmya Reddy (Bangalore South) and Samyukta Patil (Bagalkot), daughters of chief minister Siddaramaiah’s cabinet colleagues Lakshmi Hebbalkar, Ramalinga Reddy and Shivanand Patil, respectively.

Similarly, Karnataka minister SS Mallikarjun’s wife and veteran Veerashaiva-Lingayat leader Shamanur Shivashankarappa’s daughter-in-law, Prabha Mallikarjun, has been fielded from the Davanagere seat while candidates such as former Rajya Sabha MP MV Rajeev Gowda (Bangalore North), Mansoor Ali Khan (Bangalore Central) and Rajashekar Hitnal (Koppal) are also from established Congress families of the state.

In neighbouring Maharashtra, too, the party has bet on Praniti Shinde, a third-term incumbent MLA and daughter of former Maharashtra chief minister Sushil Kumar Shinde, to wrest her father’s traditional seat of Solapur while sitting MLAs Balawant Wankhede and Vasantrao Balwantrao Chavan have been fielded from the Amravati and Nanded constituencies, respectively. Wresting the Nanded seat has become a prestige issue for the Congress ever since its strongman from the constituency, former chief minister Ashok Chavan, defected to the BJP.

A ‘coup’ in Kolhapur

While the Congress’s seat-sharing negotiations with Uddhav Thackeray’s Shiv Sena (UBT) and Sharad Pawar’s NCP faction remain at an impasse, the Congress has staged a coup of sorts in the state’s Kolhapur constituency by getting Chhatrapati Shahu Maharaj, a descendant of Chhatrapati Shivaji and titular head of the erstwhile Kolhapur royal family, to contest the polls as its nominee.

The Congress-Sena-NCP’s MVA coalition, however, also hit turbulence on Thursday with Uddhav Thackeray making it clear to the Congress that his party is unwilling to withdraw its claim on the Sangli seat, a constituency where the Congress believes its leader Vishal Patil has the best chance of victory among all probable contenders from MVA partners. Congress sources told The Federal that while the party is having a tough time convincing Uddhav to part with seats like Sangli, the party has also been unable to evolve a consensus on few constituencies where its own leaders have either laid competing claims or have simply refused to contest the polls.

Chandrapur conundrum

A key sticking point within the Congress has been Maharashtra’s Chandrapur, the lone seat out of the state’s 48 constituencies, which it had won in 2019. The Congress’s central leadership, sources told The Federal, is keen to field incumbent MLA Pratibha Dhanorkar, widow of Suresh ‘Balubhai’ Dhanorkar, a strong Kunbi leader who had won the Chandrapur for the Congress five years ago, but party stalwart Vijay Wadettiwar, Leader of Opposition in the Maharashtra Assembly, is adamant that his daughter is fielded from the seat. The Congress has also been trying to convince its state unit chief Nana Patole to contest from the Bhandara-Gondiya seat — a constituency on which Sharad Pawar’s NCP faction has also staked claim — but he is unwilling to enter the contest.

The party has, for now, decided to have further discussions on these two seats, as well as on the remaining constituencies that it hopes to field candidates from, as part of the MVA/INDIA seat-sharing agreement. Party insiders said the Congress’s alliance negotiators are also having a tough time finding common ground with Lalu Yadav’s RJD on the seat-sharing agreement in Bihar while talks with the Left Front for Bengal haven’t had a breakthrough either. In Bihar, the RJD, said sources, is not willing to spare more than six seats to the Congress and two to the CPI-ML while the Congress and the Left party want to contest a minimum of nine and five seats, respectively.

Inexplicable move

In a bid to placate the Left, the Congress, however, made a surprising — and, per some senior leaders, an equally inexplicable — move of parting with Rajasthan’s Sikar constituency where the CPM will now field a candidate. The Congress was initially keen on fielding its state unit chief Govind Singh Dotasra from Sikar but he, like several other party warhorses, declined the offer. Sources said the Congress is also looking to expand the INDIA bloc in Rajasthan and negotiations are ongoing with Jat leader and Rashtriya Loktantrik Party (RLP) founder Hanuman Beniwal, as well as with Rajkumar Roat’s Bharat Adivasi Party, to join the alliance.

In Rajasthan, the Congress believes it has a strong chance of avenging the humiliation of its 2014 and 2019 routs, when the party failed to win any of the state’s 25 Lok Sabha seats. The recent induction of sitting BJP MP Rahul Kaswan — now the Congress candidate from Churu — within its ranks had already given the party a confidence booster in the state and, on Thursday, BJP strongman from Kota, Prahlad Gunjal, too switched to the Congress.

Like Kaswan, Gunjal is also likely to get a Congress ticket when the next round of candidates is announced by the party. Thursday’s list also featured Ummeda Ram Beniwal, who had quit the RLP to join the Congress last week, as the party candidate from Barmer, a seat where the Grand Old Party could suffer a setback in the coming days amid rumours that its leader Manvendra Singh ‘Jasol’, son of former Union minister and BJP stalwart late Jaswant Singh, may return to the saffron party after Holi.

More nominees on the way

The Congress’s election committee, which has been having daily meetings since Tuesday to finalise candidates, is scheduled to have further discussions, beginning Friday morning, to finalise more nominees. Sources said the party could finally take up for discussion the 17 seats from UP, including Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi’s erstwhile seats of Rae Bareli and Amethi, respectively, which it will contest as part of an alliance with Akhilesh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party. The party’s UP unit has remained adamant that Rahul must be fielded again from Amethi, his family turf that he had lost to the BJP’s Smriti Irani in 2019, while Priyanka Gandhi must make her electoral debut from Rae Bareli.

Sources said the Congress is likely to field, yet again, its UP unit chief Ajai Rai against Prime Minister Narendra Modi from Varanasi while Amroha MP Danish Ali, who joined the Congress on Wednesday, has already been assured of a ticket from his incumbent constituency. The Congress has also nearly completed its discussions for over a dozen more seats in Madhya Pradesh and is expected to declare the names of candidates from the seats in the fourth list, expected latest by Saturday per sources.

It is learnt that the Congress leadership has succeeded in convincing Rajya Sabha MP and former chief minister Digvijay Singh to contest from his erstwhile seat of Rajgarh while former Union minister Arun Yadav is expected to take on his former party colleague and now minister in the Modi government, Jyotiraditya Scindia, in Guna.

Who will take on Scindia?

The party had initially held talks with incumbent MP KP Singh Yadav, who, as the BJP’s candidate in 2019, had defeated the Congress’s Scindia in Guna, to join its ranks and take on the Gwalior royal. Sources said senior MP Congress leaders, however, believed that the party must field one of its prominent faces against Scindia and so the search narrowed down to Arun Yadav, son of late Congress stalwart and former deputy CM of MP, Subhash Yadav.

Though Arun’s home turf is Khandwa, from where he had last won in 2009 before losing the 2014 and 2019 poll battles to the BJP’s Nandkumar Singh Chauhan, and he has limited influence in Guna, sources said his candidature from the Scindia stronghold is more of a statement of seriousness by the Congress in “challenging a traitor”. Besides, Guna has a sizeable vote of the Yadav and other OBC communities, which Arun hopes to consolidate just as KP Singh Yadav had done in 2019, while the constituency also has many locally influential leaders from the co-operative movement, who were once close to Arun’s father, Subhash Yadav.