Kolkata, March 5 Five Rajya Sabha candidates from West Bengal – four from the ruling TMC and one from the BJP – filed their nominations on Thursday, officials said.
The four TMC candidates – minister Babul Supriyo, former Bengal DGP Rajeev Kumar, senior advocate Menaka Guruswamy, and actor Koel Mallick – and BJP's Rahul Sinha submitted their nomination papers in the assembly.
Five Rajya Sabha seats are falling vacant in West Bengal, and four of them were held by the TMC.
With a strong majority in the 294-member assembly, the ruling Trinamool Congress is expected to win four of the five Rajya Sabha seats from the state, while the opposition BJP is expected to secure one.
The Election Commission had announced that polling for 37 Rajya Sabha seats across multiple states, including West Bengal, would be held on March 16.
Supriyo, a former Union minister in the Narendra Modi government, joined the TMC in September 2021 after resigning from the BJP following his exclusion from the Union Council of Ministers. He later won the Ballygunge Assembly by-election on a TMC ticket and currently serves as a minister in the West Bengal government.
His nomination is seen as a reward for his political repositioning and continued role in the state government.
Kumar is a former Indian Police Service officer who served as the Director General of Police of West Bengal, and previously headed the Kolkata Police. He was also at the centre of a high-profile confrontation between the West Bengal government and central agencies during the investigation into the Saradha chit fund case.
Guruswamy, a senior advocate of the Supreme Court, was among the lawyers representing petitioners in the landmark constitutional challenge that led to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in India through the reading down of Section 377 of the IPC in 2018.
Mallick is a prominent actor in the Bengali film industry and the daughter of veteran actor Ranjit Mallick, while BJP's Rahul Sinha is a former state party president.
