Tough balancing act awaits Sonia as RS polls knock on doors

With the process for filing nominations for the June 10 Rajya Sabha polls underway, interim Congress president Sonia Gandhi is once again faced with a familiar challenge.

There are 57 Rajya Sabha seats up for election. The Congress can win a maximum of 11 seats but the aspirants lining up for these berths outnumber the vacancies by a long shot.

Limited seats, aspirants galore

For Sonia, there is evidently a tough balancing act at hand, made tougher still by a complex matrix of demands and expectations from different sections of her party.

There are those from the infamous Old Guard – including the so-called G-23 leaders such as Ghulam Nabi Azad and Anand Sharma whose Rajya Sabha terms expired earlier this year, or Vivek Tankha who is set to retire on June 29 – who believe the party owes them a nomination as continuing reward for their service.

And then there are others at different levels of the party hierarchy, elders as well as relatively younger, who swear their allegiance to different members of the Gandhi family – Sonia, Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra. The factors at play for these differ from one aspirant to the other – some wish to be rewarded for their continuing loyalty to the Gandhi family, others who the Gandhis wish to reward; there are those who fit the party’s renascent pledge to promote youth and others who belong to the different oppressed communities the Congress wishes to woo electorally in a bid to regain their trust.

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As such, for the 11 seats that Sonia has to offer her colleagues in Parliament’s Upper House, the list of aspirants include Azad, Sharma, Tankha, P Chidambaram, Ambika Soni, Mukul Wasnik, Jairam Ramesh, Kumari Selja, Avinash Pande, Jitendra Singh, K Raju, Pawan Khera, Randeep Surjewala, Praveen Chakravarthy, Pramod Tiwari, Rajiv Shukla and Akhilesh Prasad Singh. There are also another half a dozen leaders who fancy a ticket for themselves and have been lobbying at different levels of the party hierarchy.

What Sibal’s exit means for Congress?

Amid this mêlée, the exit of senior advocate Kapil Sibal from the Congress – he claimed on Wednesday (May 25) morning that he had resigned from the party on May 16 – has ironically come as some sort of relief. A senior Congress leader told The Federal that Sibal’s exit is actually a “win win situation for us – the party won’t have to put up with his regular outbursts and he will still remain an MP”. Sibal has filed his nomination as an independent candidate for a Rajya Sabha seat from Uttar Pradesh and will be backed by Akhilesh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party, which has the required bench strength of MLAs to ensure his victory.

But Sibal’s exit from the crisis-ridden Congress is also a pointer to the issues confronting Sonia as she gets down to finalising her party’s candidates.

Within the Congress, it is widely acknowledged that the party’s inability to generously award Rajya Sabha tickets to many of its leaders – a direct consequence of its reduced legislative strength across different state assemblies – has been a key trigger for the intermittent outbursts directed against the Gandhi family over the past two years.

It is no secret that a significant chunk of the so-called G-23 leaders who have routinely called for an overhaul of the party to stem and reverse the Congress’s electoral tailspin are actually those who can’t win a direct election on their own. Azad, Sharma, Sibal and Tankha have all relied on the party’s past charity in rewarding them with Rajya Sabha berths each time they were rejected by the electorate – or, as in Sharma’s case, if they shied away from contesting a direct election for the entirety of their long political innings.

With the SP’s support, the Congress had sent Sibal to the Rajya Sabha from UP in July 2016 after he lost the 2014 Lok Sabha elections from the Chandni Chowk constituency that he had won in 2004 and 2009 when the going was still good for the Grand Old Party in Delhi. His direct attack at the Gandhis in an interview to a national daily earlier this year had made it clear that the Congress will not be bringing him back to the Rajya Sabha once his current term ends on July 4.

For a better part of the past two years, Sibal was among the most vocal members of G-23; criticising the monopoly of the Gandhis on leadership and the resultant lack of internal democracy in the party while constantly projecting himself – and his G-23 colleagues – as those who can’t be part of a ‘Ji Huzur’ (yes man) club.

Now, having ensured SP founding member Azam Khan’s release from prison on bail earlier this month, Sibal has guaranteed his return to the Rajya Sabha. Whether he also bats for internal democracy in the SP and the end of the Yadav clan’s monopoly on SP leadership in the coming weeks and months is a different matter. Akhilesh, clearly seems to be in mood for charity and willing to forget that Sibal was among the cabal of senior UPA ministers who, in 2007, launched an unsuccessful bid to impose President’s Rule in Uttar Pradesh and dismiss the then Mulayam Singh Yadav-led SP government.

Also read: Congress makes light of Kapil Sibal’s resignation

With Sibal out of the Congress and plans afoot within the party high command to grant yet another Rajya Sabha term to Azad, Sharma and Tankha, the Gandhis may also be hoping to use the impending biennial elections to dismantle the G-23 for good.

G-23 outreach

Sources say Azad could be named candidate either from Tamil Nadu or Maharashtra (where the party will need to take support of allies NCP and Shiv Sena) or Haryana (where the Congress has enough MLAs to win a seat). If the party fields Azad from Tamil Nadu, Sharma could be accommodated from Haryana and the lone seat the party hopes to pick from Maharashtra may be given to Mukul Wasnik, another G-23 leader who has now decisively returned to the coterie of Gandhi family loyalists. Tankha is reportedly banking on his excellent rapport with former MP CM Kamal Nath to have him elected from the lone seat the Congress can win from Madhya Pradesh.

The Congress is hopeful of winning two seats each from Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh and one each from Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka and Haryana. With the help of its allies in states such as Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Jharkhand and a bunch of independent legislators who support the Ashok Gehlot-led government in Rajasthan, the Congress hopes to win one seat from each of these states too.

Extending party tickets to the likes of Azad, Sharma, Wasnik and Tankha would also signal Sonia’s willingness to forget and forgive the diatribe that the G-23 had launched against her through a controversial letter back in August 2020 and on other occasions since and then move on to the real challenge of correcting her organisation’s weaknesses in time for the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.

Besides, these Rajya Sabha polls are also important for the Congress as they precede the all-important Presidential polls due in July. A failure on the Congress’s part to maximise its wins in these polls would directly benefit the BJP’s plan for the Presidential polls given that the saffron party is, despite its apparent electoral might, nearly 25000 points short of a majority mark to get its Presidential nominee elected on the existing Parliamentary and assembly strength of the NDA constituents.

Bringing back old warhorses

Further, if the Congress’s tally in the Upper House falls below 26 after this round of the Rajya Sabha polls, it stands to lose its claim on the post of Leader of Opposition. The Congress’s tally in the Rajya Sabha is already at a historic low of 29 seats – nine of these members, including the likes of P. Chidambaram, Jairam Ramesh, Ambika Soni and Sibal are retiring in June or July. As such, the importance of the 11 seats the party hopes to win to shore up its present tally marginally to 31 members is of immense significance to the GOP and the Gandhis.

Thus, Sonia must also ensure that after apportioning tickets to the likes of Azad and Sharma, she needs to field on the remaining seats candidates who will not only stick to the Congress but also prove helpful to the party in effectively countering the BJP. It is in this context that the party, as per sources, wants to ensure that old warhorses such as Chidambaram and Jairam Ramesh return to the Rajya Sabha once again. Chidambaram, like Azad, too is hoping to be elected from his home state of Tamil Nadu but the party may also bring him in from Chhattisgarh. For Ramesh, sources say, a return from Karnataka – the state he presently represents in the Upper House – is almost certain.

Also read: Can Sonia’s two panels reverse electoral fortunes of Congress?

This then leaves Sonia with very little scope to accommodate other leaders – including those being backed by Rahul and Priyanka. While Sonia is keen on giving a ticket to Kumari Selja, a senior Dalit face of the party who recently lost her job as Haryana Congress chief due to the Gandhis backing her arch rival Bhupinder Hooda’s nominee Udai Bhan, Rahul, say sources, wants another Dalit leader, K Raju, to be sent to the Rajya Sabha.

Among the other leaders Rahul is supposedly backing for a ticket are Randeep Surjewala, Praveen Chakravarthy, Pawan Khera and Jitendra Singh. Priyanka, say sources, is backing senior leaders Rajiv Shukla, Pramod Tiwari and Akhilesh Prasad Singh.