Congress Parliamentary Party chairperson and former party president Sonia Gandhi filed her nomination papers in Jaipur on Wednesday for the upcoming Rajya Sabha polls from Rajasthan. This is her first term in the Upper House after serving five terms as a Lok Sabha MP.
The Rajya Sabha election is due on February 27.
The 77-year-old, who represented Raebareli in Lok Sabha, will not contest the 2024 Lok Sabha election. In the last general elections, she had announced that it was her last election.
It is widely speculated that Sonia Gandhi’s daughter and Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra is likely to contest from the Raebareli seat in Uttar Pradesh. In January 2019, ahead of the Lok Sabha election, Priyanka Gandhi formally entered politics after she was appointed as the AICC General Secretary in charge of the eastern part of Uttar Pradesh on 23 January. The Gandhi family pocket boroughs of Amethi, which was earlier represented by Rahul Gandhi, and Raebareli, are also part of the Congress’s Eastern UP regional unit.
Sonia Gandhi has been representing the Raebareli seat since 2004. She became an MP for the first time in 1999 in Amethi, a seat that was represented by her husband and former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. In 2004, she shifted to Raebareli, leaving the Amethi Lok Sabha seat for Rahul Gandhi.
According to Congress insiders, The Indian Express says, the party decided against making her contest from the southern state of Telangana and Karnataka, as Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge represents the Upper House from Karnataka, and Rahul Gandhi is an MP from Kerala.
The decision to make Sonia Gandhi contest from Rajasthan is likely because the party wants to send a signal that it has not abandoned the Hindi heartland.
The Congress is comfortably placed to win one of the three Rajya Sabha seats from Rajasthan, a seat which will fall vacant after ex-prime minister Manmohan Singh completes his six-year tenure in April.
In 1999, Sonia Gandhi was first elected as an MP after taking over as the Congress president. She became the second member of the Gandhi family to enter the Rajya Sabha, after late Congress leader and former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who was a member of the Upper House from August 1964 to February 1967, before she won the Lok Sabha election from Raebareli.
All about the Raebareli Lok Sabha seat:
The Raebareli Lok Sabha constituency is one of the 80 Lok Sabha (parliamentary) constituencies in UttarPradesh state, and comprises of entire Raebareli district.
In the 2019 election, Sonia Gandhi got 1,23,043 votes, defeating her rival BJP candidate Dinesh Pratap Singh 61,637 votes.
In the 2014 Lok Sabha election, Sonia Gandhi had won again garnering 1,24,588 votes, while BJP candidate Ajay Agrawal got 28,970 votes.