New Delhi: Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman and Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal, are certain to obtain Rajya Sabha seats. Nirmala Sitharaman is certain to get a berth from Karnataka and Piyush Goyal is up for re-election from Maharashtra.
Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi and Prakash Javadekar, both former Union Ministers, are out of the race for the Upper House berths.
OP Mathur, BJP general secretary Dushyant Gautam, and Vinay Sahastrabuddhe have not been repeated. The BJP’s chief whip in the Rajya Sabha and former Union Minister Shiv Pratap Shukla is also excluded.
Sanjay Seth, who switched to the Samajwadi Party before the UP election, and BJP national spokesperson Syed Zafar Islam have been dropped.
Six candidates have been named from Uttar Pradesh, where 11 seats are vacant: Laxmikant Bajpai, Radha Mohan Agarwal, Surendra Nagar, Baburam Nishad, Darshana Singh, and Sangeeta Yadav.
The name of Rajya Sabha member Radha Mohan Agrawal, who vacated his Gorakhpur seat for UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath to fight in the February-March state election, has been named for Rajya Sabha.
The other candidates from UP are Baburam Nishad, Darshana Singh, and Sangeeta Yadav.
SC Dubey, a Rajya Sabha member from Bihar, has been nominated again. Shambhu Sharon Patel, an OBC (Other Backward Class) leader, is the other candidate from Bihar.
Farmer Leader and Maharashtra Minister, Anil Sukhdevrao Bonde, will go to the Rajya Sabha.