NEW DELHI: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has pulled a few surprises on its own cadre by dropping some top leaders, including former Union and state ministers, and a party general secretary, from its list of Rajya Sabha candidates.
Among those who did not find a place are Union Minister for Minority Affairs Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, former ministers M J Akbar and Shiv Pratap Shukla, and party’s former general secretary O P Mathur, who was in charge of Gujarat and was once considered the man who would replace
Vasundhara Raje as BJP’s top leader in Rajasthan. Others who lost out are RSS favourite Vinay Sahasrabuddhe, former Union minister Prakash Javadekar and BJP spokesperson Zafar Islam, who was credited with facilitating Congress leader Jyotiraditya Scindia’s entry into the BJP.
All of them are outgoing members of the Rajya Sabha and were expected to be renominated. Congress leader RPN Singh, who had recently joined the BJP, has also lost out.
The party on Monday announced four more candidates for the polls — the party’s OBC wing chief K Laxman and Mithilesh Kumar from Uttar Pradesh, Sumitra Valmiki from Madhya Pradesh, Lal Singh Sirhoya from Karnataka.
With this addition, the BJP has so far named a total of 22 candidates for the election for 57 Rajya Sabha seats.
A surprise entrant into the race whose name was earlier doing the rounds was the Vice-Chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University, Tariq Mansoor.
He is said to be close to RSS leader Krishna Gopal Sharma and has become the first Vice-Chancellor in the history of AMU to get an extension in tenure. He was given a one-year extension after his term ended last month.
Meanwhile, despondency runs high in the camp of Naqvi, who is in the Rajya Sabha from the Jharkhand quota of BJP.
“Is it the prize that a minority leader gets for being loyal to the party?,” a Muslim BJP leader told TNIE.
“At a time when Prime Minister Narendra Modi claims to be working on the mantra, sab ka saath sab ka vikaas, dropping a lone Muslim face in the ministry, whose loyalty to party remains unquestioned so far, will put a dent on its image,” another BJP leader, preferring anonymity, said.
