Veteran Congress leader and former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is set to represent Rajya Sabha from Rajasthan. Singh will be the party’s candidate from Jaipur for the Upper House of parliament, reported news agency ANI. The report further stated that Singh will fly to Jaipur on August 13, 2019, to file his nomination.
The elections to the Rajya Sabha in Rajasthan were necessitated following the death of BJP MP Madan Lal Saini. Saini passed away in a hospital in the national capital on June 24, 2019. He was elected to the Rajya Sabha last year when the BJP’s Vasundhara Raje was in power in the state.
The Congress party has a majority in the 200-member Rajasthan assembly. Apart from this, Singh has the support of Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and few independent MLAs.
Former PM Singh has represented Assam for five consecutive terms (1991- 2019) in the upper house. If he gets elected, then he will have his tenure in the upper house till April 03, 2024. Singh’s previous tenure in the Rajya Sabha ended on June 14, 2019. He served as the Prime Minister for two consecutive terms from 2004 to 2014.
Meanwhile, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is likely to field defectors from other parties which include former Congress leader Sanjay Sinh and former Samajwadi Party leader Surendra Nagar as its candidates for the election. The duo had recently resigned from the Rajya Sabha membership and joined the saffron party.
Currently, Congress has 46 MPs in the upper house followed by BJP’s 78, Trinamool Congress’s 13, Samajwadi Party’s 10, AIADMK’s 11, Aam Aadmi Party’s 3, Telangana Rashtra Samithi’s 6 MPs.
The notification for the Rajya Sabha vacancy was announced by the Election Commission of India on August 07, 2019. The last date for filing the nominations is August 14, 2019. The elections will take place on August 26, 2019, and the result will be declared on the same day.