Shimla, March 4 The name of the Congress candidate for the lone Rajya Sabha seat will be announced at the time of filing the nomination on Thursday, Chief Minister Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu said on Wednesday.
The candidate will be from Himachal Pradesh, he said while interacting with the media here on the occasion of Holi.
March 5 is the last date for filing nominations for the Rajya Sabha, and the polling will be held on March 16. The election is necessary as the six-year term of BJP leader Indu Goswami, who was unopposed in 2020, is coming to an end.
"There is neither suspense nor fear regarding the election," Sukhu said, asserting that democracy would not be "sold like before".
With a clear majority in the 68-member Himachal Pradesh Assembly, the Congress' victory is a certainty, but the party is haunted by its bitter experience in the last Rajya Sabha election, where it lost the seat to the BJP despite having 40 MLAs and the backing of three Independents.
In the last election in February 2024, BJP candidate Harsh Mahajan defeated Congress' Abhishek Manu Singhvi after they ended in a tie as six Congress MLAs cross-voted in favour of the BJP. The three Independents also voted against the Congress, and both candidates polled 34 votes each.
Currently, there are 40 members of Congress and 28 members of the BJP in the state assembly. A meeting of the Himachal Pradesh Congress Legislative Party has been convened on March 5.
So far, neither the Congress nor the BJP has announced their candidates, and BJP leaders have maintained that they would field a candidate only if the Congress candidate is not from Himachal Pradesh.
According to Congress sources, the names being considered this year include former Union minister Anand Sharma, former state president Pratibha Singh (wife of late former chief minister Virbhadra Singh), Congress in-charge for the state Rajni Patil, Health Minister Dhani Ram Shandil, former education minister Asha Kumari, IT advisor to the chief minister Gokul Butail, Congress spokesperson Pawan Khera, and the chief minister's loyalists including his political advisor Sunil Bittu and Advocate General Anup Ratan.
However, the name of Nigam Bandhari has also emerged. Nigam Bandhari, General Secretary of the Indian Youth Congress (IYC), hails from Kinnaur district. He was among the IYC activists who held a demonstration without clothes at the recent AI impact summit in Delhi.
