BJP drops Puri and Verma and names eight new Rajya Sabha candidates in Uttar Pradesh

The Bharatiya Janata Party on Monday named eight candidates for the Rajya Sabha election from Uttar Pradesh and dropped every one of its seven outgoing members from the state. The dropped names include two Union ministers, Hardeep Singh Puri and B.L. Verma. The other outgoing members left off the list are Arun Singh, Brijlal, Geeta Shakya, Seema Dwivedi and Neeraj Shekhar. Their terms end in November.

An eighth seat is already empty. Dinesh Sharma resigned from the Rajya Sabha after he was appointed lieutenant governor of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. He had been deputy chief minister of Uttar Pradesh. The vacancy is why the party is filing eight names rather than seven.

The eight names

The candidates are Dharampal Singh, a cabinet minister in the Uttar Pradesh government, Radhakant Ojha, Prakash Pal, Vidyasagar Sonkar, Gopi Krishna Pandey, Priyanka Singh Rawat, Ram Pratap Singh Chauhan and Shruti Gangwar. Hindustan Times, reporting from Lucknow, described them as organisational and state-level figures who had not been the names in circulation over the previous few days. Two of the eight are women, Priyanka Singh Rawat and Shruti Gangwar. The paper's caste reading of the list is three candidates from the Other Backward Classes, two from the Scheduled Castes, and three from the upper castes, of whom two are Brahmin and one is Rajput.

That reading is a party-management fact, not a legal one. Rajya Sabha seats from a state are filled by the legislative assembly, by proportional vote. Uttar Pradesh's assembly has a large BJP majority. Eight seats is a number the party can carry on its own votes if its MLAs stay in line. The list is therefore a decision about who sits in Delhi, not a decision about whether the seats are winnable.

What dropping a Union minister means

Puri is the more widely known of the two ministers left off. A Rajya Sabha term is six years. Missing the renomination does not remove a minister on the day of the announcement. It removes the seat he would have returned to in November, unless he is found another vacancy in another state or the prime minister keeps him in the cabinet by some other route. Verma is in the same position. The party did not, in Monday's list, explain either omission. It published eight other names.

Arun Singh is a general secretary of the party. Leaving him off a home-state list is a different kind of signal from leaving off a minister, because his job is the organisation rather than a department. Brijlal is a former director general of police in Uttar Pradesh who has sat in the upper house. Geeta Shakya, Seema Dwivedi and Neeraj Shekhar complete the outgoing seven. Shekhar is the son of the late prime minister Chandra Shekhar. None of them is on the new slate.

The election itself is a vote of MLAs, on a date the Election Commission sets, for terms that start when the November retirements take effect. Monday's act is the nomination. The assembly arithmetic in Lucknow makes the nomination the result, unless the party splits its own vote or an opposition combination finds a ninth seat the numbers do not currently suggest. The people who will not be in the upper house from Uttar Pradesh after November, if this list holds, are the seven whose terms are ending and who were not asked to stand again.