Political Pickle

Manmohan Singh, MP from Tamil Nadu?

Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s term in the Rajya Sabha will come to an end on 14 June. Though the Election Commission has announced elections on 7 June to fill the two Rajya Sabha seats from Assam, the Congress does not have the required numbers to send him to the Upper House for a sixth term. 

Subscribe to Filter Kaapi channel on You Tube

The plan is to wait for the results to the Lok Sabha elections on 23 May. The first option is Madhya Pradesh where the Congress is in power and can easily elect Dr Singh to the Rajya Sabha. If Digvijay Singh wins against Sadhvi Pragya Thakur in Bhopal, he will resign his Rajya Sabha seat and Manmohan Singh can fill in that vacancy. The catch however, is that Digvijay Singh’s term would expire in 2020.

But if Digvijay Singh does not win from Bhopal, he would continue as an Elder in Parliament and won’t be disturbed to make way for Dr Singh.

Plan B has been put into action as well. DMK leader Kanimozhi is contesting from the Tuticorin Lok Sabha constituency and the party expects her to win comfortably against Tamil Nadu BJP chief Dr Tamilisai Sounderarajan. A request has been made from the Congress side to DMK chief MK Stalin to accommodate Manmohan Singh from Tamil Nadu. Kanimozhi’s term along with five other MPs will end in July 2019. 

Stalin is reported to have responded positively as the DMK feels there will be a certain element of pride in sending the former PM as lawmaker from Tamil Nadu. Besides, the party feels such a move will help it in the assembly elections that it expects to take place much before the scheduled time of 2021. Stalin has already gone public with his decision to back Rahul Gandhi for Prime Minister if the UPA gets the numbers next Thursday. 

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo

You are commenting using your Google account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.