Chastened Congress to choose one Delhi seat for ‘primaries’

The party wants to see whether wider selection process this experiment entails will help it retain one of the seven seats

Of the 15 Lok Sabha seats the Congress is picking for its ‘primaries’ project, one will be selected from the seven constituencies in Delhi, all of which are now held by the party.

The party wants to see whether the wider selection process this experiment entails will help it retain at least one of the seven seats after its debacle in the Assembly elections last month.

The seven MPs are Union Ministers Kapil Sibal and Krishna Tirath; party communication chief Ajay Maken; chief whip in Parliament Sandeep Dikshit; the former PCC chief, Jaiprakash Aggarwal; Ramesh Kumar and Mahabal Mishra.

Three more seats chosen are also among those won by the Congress in 2009: Hoshangabad in Madhya Pradesh; Gurgaon in Haryana; and Jhunjhunu in Rajasthan. While Hoshangabad has been selected because Uday Pratap Singh, who won as a Congress candidate, walked over to the BJP just before last month’s Assembly elections in Madhya Pradesh, Rao Inderjit Singh, a three-time MP from Gurgaon, who had announced he was quitting the party after seeking a CBI probe into the land deals of Congress president Sonia Gandhi’s son-in-law Robert Vadra, has joined the BJP. Jhunjhunu was held by the party’s Jat stalwart, Sis Ram Ola, who was Union Labour Minister till his death last month.

Of the remaining 11 seats selected, eight are held by the BJP — Guwahati in Assam; Bangalore North and Dakshina Kannada in Karnataka; Dhule in Maharashtra; Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh; Bhavnagar and Vadodara in Gujarat; and Indore in Madhya Pradesh.

The three others were won by the Shiv Sena (Auranagabad in Maharashtra), the Bahujan Samaj Party (Sant Kabir Nagar in Uttar Pradesh), and the Trinamool Congress (North Kolkatta).

An electoral college consisting of around 1,000 people at the block, tehsil and district levels will vote for the most suitable candidate. The one who polls the maximum votes will be given ticket.

Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi announced the decision as an attempt to break through nepotism. The success of this project will determine its use in other constituencies in future.