Union Ministers Kapil Sibal and Krishna Tirath, who currently represent Chandni Chowk and Delhi North West, have objected to their constituencies being included in the list of those selected for Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi’s pet “primaries” project, ahead of the general election.
As a consequence, these two constituencies that figured in the list of 16 Lok Sabha seats for ‘INC Primary’ placed on the party website, vanished within hours.
Party general secretary — and head of the Congress’s communications section — Ajay Maken, who represents New Delhi told The Hindu that he “offered” his seat for the experiment. However, it is not clear now whether that will be enough or one more seat from Delhi will be selected.
Picking two seats in Delhi was proving difficult as all seven are currently held by the party: apart from Mr. Sibal, Ms. Tirath and Mr. Maken, the incumbents are the Congress’s chief whip in Parliament Sandeep Dikshit, former PCC chief J.P. Aggarwal, Ramesh Kumar and Mahabal Mishra.
But not all sitting MPs are worried that they may not emerge from the primaries experiment as a candidate — Madhya Pradesh’s Mandsaur — who did not figure in the draft list is now in. The sitting MP is party secretary Meenakshi Natarajan, considered to be in Mr. Gandhi’s inner circle who, party sources said, has offered her seat for the project.
Congress general secretary and five-time MP Gurudas Kamat, too, has told Mr. Gandhi that his seat should be included in the list of constituencies where candidate selection would be done through the primary system. Mr. Kamat represented Mumbai North East four times — 1984, 1991, 1998, and 2004 — in the Lok Sabha before he shifted to Mumbai North West in 2009 after delimitation. However, his seat has not yet been included yet in the final list.
There have been some other changes in the original draft list: the first list had Hoshangabad, Gurgaon and Dhule — all three have now been excluded. Hoshangabad and Gurgaon were both won by the Congress in 2009, but the two MPs — Uday Pratap Singh and Rao Inderjit Singh — have since joined the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
A party functionary told The Hindu, “The electoral college consists of the party’s past and current office-bearers in the constituency. At this stage it is not clear how many of them still owe allegiance to the two MPs who have left the Congress. Under these circumstances, it was felt it was safer not to include these constituencies in case some of them mislead us in the selection process.”
Dhule was dropped as the seat is likely to go to the Congress’s partner in Maharashtra, the Nationalist Congress Party, and replaced with Yavatmal-Washim, as the Congress is making a pitch to get the seat. Dhule is currently held by the BJP; Yawatmal by the Shiv Sena.
The other constituencies in the “primary” list are Guwahati (Assam), Bhavnagar and Vadodara (Gujarat), Bangalore North and Daskshin Kannada (Karnataka), Indore (Madhya Pradesh) Aurangabad and Yavatamal-Washim (Maharashtra), Sant Kabir Nagar and Varanasi (Uttar Pradesh), Kolkata North (West Bengal), Bikaner and Jhunjhunu (Rajasthan). Of these, all are held by Opposition parties, barring Jhunjhunu that was held by the party’s Jat stalwart, Sis Ram Ola, who was Union Labour Minister till his death last month.
A party functionary, explaining why the changes became necessary, said, “After a tentative list was drawn up, it was then shown to the general secretaries in charge of the various States, following which it was mended.”
