The biennial elections to the Rajya Sabha will be held in March-April, but from now on, lobbying and manipulation has started. Although the maximum contenders for the Rajya Sabha are from West Bengal, but there is no election this year. In Bengal, six seats are falling vacant in August next year. Therefore, Mamata Banerjee and her team can keep the leaders from outside engaged till August of next year. However, the most interesting elections to the Rajya Sabha are to be held in Bihar and Jharkhand and this will happen because the Congress party is hoping for one seat each in both the states.
There will be bi-elections for five seats in Bihar and by-elections on one seat. Since the seat for the by-election is of Janata Dal-U, that seat will go to its account. Out of the remaining five seats, three seats will go to the ruling coalition and two seats will go to the RJD-Congress-Left alliance. Last time both the seats went to the account of RJD, so this time Congress is asking for one seat. The problem with RJD is that its vacant seat belongs to Misa Bharti and Tejashwi Yadav is compelled to send his sister to Rajya Sabha again.
Tejashwi wants Congress to leave Congress seat this time, it will get one seat in 2024. Congress, on the other hand, says that it has one seat in 2024 because its leader Akhilesh Prasad Singh is retiring. That seat was won by Congress in 2018. Then he did not get the seat in 2020, so this time he has a claim. Who will be the Congress candidate, it is not decided but the party is pressurizing for the first seat. It is being said that Tejashwi has said that he will talk to Rahul Gandhi about this.
On the other hand, the Congress has 18 MLAs in the Jharkhand Assembly and the government of Hemant Soren, formed after the 2019 assembly elections, is running with the support of the Congress. In the last election i.e. 2020, the founder of Jharkhand Mukti Morcha, Shibu Soren was sent to the Rajya Sabha. It was decided at that time that the Congress would get the seat next time i.e. in 2022. However, now Chief Minister Hemant Sore is pressurizing the Congress to leave the seat. Two seats are falling vacant in the state, out of which one seat will go to the BJP and the other seat will go to the JMM-Congress-RJD alliance. Hemant’s party JMM has been able to win one seat on its own. But the support of Congress is necessary to run the government. So there is a tussle going on. Even there the candidate of Congress is not fixed but Congress wants to confirm it by claiming the seat. After that the party high command will make someone a candidate.
