The ongoing Jammu and Kashmir Assembly elections could well determine whether senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad will continue as the next Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha as his term as an MP in the Upper House ends on February 15 — as do those of the other three members from the northern State.
Mr. Azad’s continuance in the job, therefore, will be decided by whether he can be re-elected to the RS.
The Congress, which won 17 Assembly seats in the 2008 elections, party sources said, is hoping to get somewhere between eight and 12 seats this time, so that it could tag on to the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), the outfit that is expected to win the largest number of seats in these elections — in 2008, the PDP got 21 and the BJP 11, while the National Conference, the top scorer, got 28.
If the party is able to pull off a post-poll PDP-Congress government, then Mr. Azad could continue in the job. For, with the party’s numbers shrinking in State after State, as Assembly elections take place, the likelihood of a slot emerging elsewhere in the coming months looks remote.
It is against this backdrop that jockeying for the Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha has begun within the Congress. The former Commerce Minister Anand Sharma, currently the Deputy Leader of the Congress in the Upper House, is seen as one of those in the running, even though the list of 69 Congress members boasts many party seniors. They include the former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the former Defence Minister A.K. Antony, Congress president Sonia Gandhi’s Political Secretary Ahmed Patel, and party general secretaries Digvijay Singh, Ambika Soni, Janardan Dwivedi and Madhusudan Mistry — the last named seen by many as a Rahul Gandhi favourite — not to mention Satyavrat Chaturvedi.
Clearly given that the Opposition outnumbers the government in the Rajya Sabha, and the Congress, as the largest party in the House, has the LoP’s slot, the job needs to be done by someone who is both respected as well as has a good equation with other parties.
Mr. Azad had been chosen for precisely these reasons by the Congress leadership but has been missing for much of the current session as he has been campaigning intensively in Jammu and Kashmir: in a brief stopover in the national capital recently he had a meeting where he is believed to have emphasised the need for effective floor coordination with other parties.
