Rajya Sabha polls: TMC names 6 candidates, BJP to get first elected MP from Bengal

NEW DELHI: With seven Rajya Sabha seats from West Bengal falling vacant next month, Trinamool Congress has renominated three of its sitting members to the House and named three young, new faces for the polls to be held on July 24.

The lone Congress seat from West Bengal that was represented by party veteran Pradip Bhattacharya, will also fall vacant next month and make way for the first elected BJP member from the state to the Upper House.

With Congress and Left Front having been wiped out from the Bengal assembly in 2021, when BJP picked up 77 seats in the state for the first time, Congress will have no representation from the state in RS and neither will the Left parties.

The party on Monday named its leader in the Upper House Derek O’ Brien, deputy leader Sukhendu Sekhar Roy – for their third term in Rajya Sabha. Sitting MP Dola Sen first joined the House in 2017, while O’Brien joined in 2011 and Roy beame a member in 2012.

TMC has also named three new faces – RTI activist Saket Gokhale (36), who joined the party some time back and has been a spokesperson, Kolkata-based social activist and professor Samirul Islam (35) and TMC's Alipurduar district president Prakash Chik Baraik (42), who represents a Scheduled Tribe community, for their first term in the Upper House.

Baraik, a former clerk at Nulands Tea estate in Alipurduar, has been in politics since 2018. He was made the party’s Alipurduar president in August 2021 to stem the losses to the BJP in the district. He has been rewarded for turning the party’s organisation around in Alipurduar, where it had suffered at the hands of BJP, say party insiders.

Islam, an IIT-Delhi alumnus and a chemistry professor at Dinabandhu Andrews College, is not aligned to any political party and champions social causes under the Bangla Sanskriti Mancha banner. He was part of the No-Vote-to-BJP, anti-CAA and NRC movements in the state before the 2021 assembly elections. Islam said he might never have been associated with an organised political party but was always into politics. “I liked the idea of CM Mamata Banerjee forming a committee for migrant labourers during the pandemic… Didi has asked me to fight for the rights of the marginalised in Bengal and for the rights of this state. I want to play this role,” he said.

Thanking the TMC leadership for nominating him, Gokhale tweeted, “I'm overwhelmed by their faith in me & for giving this opportunity to a young middle-class boy who comes from a non-political background.”

Besides O'Brien, Ray and Sen, the tenures of TMC MPs Sushmita Dev (from Assam) and Shanta Chhetri (Darjeeling) ended following which these six seats fell vacant.

A seventh Rajya Sabha seat from West Bengal is vacant after former Goa chief minister Luizinho Faleiro resigned as TMC MP in April. A bypoll will be held in that seat along with the elections to these six seats on July 24.

“We take great pleasure in announcing the candidatures of Derek O'Brien, Dola Sen, Sukhendu Sekhar, Samirul Islam, Prakash Chik Baraik and Saket Gokhale for the forthcoming Rajya Sabha elections,” the TMC said in a tweet.

TMC officially has 217 MLAs in the Bengal assembly but, at various times, seven more MLAs — six from the BJP and one from the Congress — have expressed their support for the party outside the assembly. The BJP officially has 75 MLAs in the assembly but may not be able to count on the support of at least six MLAs.

Leader of Opposition in Bengal assembly Suvendu Adhikari, on Monday said, BJP will name its Rajya Sabha candidates on Tuesday. The party has had nominated leaders to the upper house (Swapan Dasgupta and Roopa Ganguly) but has never had an elected member. Acharya Debaprasad Ghosh was elected to the RS in 1952 from the Jana Sangha.