By Saroor Ahmed

The main difference between the Bharatiya Janata Party and Congress as well as Janata Dal (United) is that while the former dropped its loyalists sitting Rajya Sabha MPs the other two got rid of those leaders who were considered as dissidents in the respective parties.

Union minister for minorities affairs Mokhtar Abbas Naqvi, former ministers Prakash Javadekar and M J Akbar, spokesman, Syed Zafar Islam, Shiv Pratap Shukla, former general secretary O P Mathur, former Bihar party president Gopal Narayan Singh and Vinay Sahasrabuddhe failed to get the ticket though they are all staunch Narendra Modi loyalists.

Gopal Narayan Singh’s case may be somewhat different as he is 79, though it is also true that the party had in the past given ticket to those above 75. Singh, a Rajput and said to be close to defence minister Rajnath Singh, was replaced with Shambhu Sharan Patel, a Dhanuk (an Extremely Backward Caste) from Sheikhpura district of Bihar. Till a few years back he was in Janata Dal (United).

As reported the Congress did not give ticket to two members of Group of 23–Ghulam Nabi Azad and Anand Sharma–the Janata Dal (United) opted for a relatively unknown figure over the Steel minister RCP Singh, once rated as a very trusted associate of the party boss and Bihar chief minister, Nitish Kumar.

RCP Singh, a 1984-batch IAS officer of Uttar Pradesh cadre, is a Kurmi from Nitish Kumar’s home turf of Nalanda district.Both have three decades long association and Nitish as the railway minister during the previous NDA rule made him his Special Secretary. When Nitish became the chief minister of Bihar in 2005 he made R C P Singh his Principal Secretary.

RCP Singh became the de facto number two in the party after he quit his job and was elected for Rajya Sabha in 2010.

However, he became uneasy when Nitish made election strategist Prashant Kishor the vice president of the party (2018-19).

During the lockdown of March-April 2020 RCP Singh maintained distance from Nitish and reportedly spent all his time at his native village in Nalanda district. Both he and the present party chief Lallan Singh then kept low profile during the Oct-Nov 2020 Assembly election campaign. But in the last week of December the same year Nitish made him the national president of Janata Dal (United).

But the relationship started deteriorating after R C P Singh was inducted into the cabinet by PM Narendra Modi on July 7, 2021.

Actually Nitish was demanding at least two ministerial berths as his party has 16 MPs in Lok Sabha. He wanted Lallan Singh to be taken into the Union cabinet as well.

Perhaps, Nitish was not in favour of R C P Singh alone taking oath. The Bihar CM felt that he had become too big for his boots and removed him from the post of party president. Lallan Singh took over this post.
What is interesting is that Nitish’s party announced the name of Khiru Mahto, JD(U)’s Jharkhand president as its candidate just after the BJP released the names of its two nominees from Bihar on May 29 evening. They are S C Dubey and Shambhu Sharan. So there was absolutely no option left for R C P Singh to look towards the BJP.

But the scenario in the BJP is even more confusing. Last year Modi on July 7 dropped Javadekar and Ravi Shankar Prasad from the Union cabinet like a hot potato. The former now finds his name missing from the list of the Rajya Sabha candidates.

Political observers are surprised over the way the saffron party has decided not to send the three trusted Muslim faces to the Rajya Sabha. But this is not the first case of overlooking the claim of any Muslim leader in the party.

Syed Shahnawaz Husain was made Union cabinet minister by the then PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee when he was still in his early 30s. After the advent of Modi he failed to get ticket from any House of Parliament. In 2021 he was made Member of Legislative Council from Bihar and later asked to serve as a minister in the Nitish Kumar cabinet. Shahnawaz accepted this demotion on the plea that he is a true soldier of the party.

If the ruling BJP can afford to ignore the claim of its loyalist sitting MPs the opposition Congress has every reason to dump the grumbling old horses. The moot question is how wise it would be to overlook Anand Sharma when the Assembly election in Himachal Pradesh, his home state, is due later this year. Sharma, like Ghulam Nabi Azad is a former Union minister and is a Brahmin, whose presence is quite palpable in Himachal Pradesh.