Rajya Sabha Polls: Congress caves to JMM to prevent another HP? Power Games

The Rajya Sabha seat in Jharkhand, which became vacant when party member Dheeraj Sahu’s term ended, has been renounced by the Congress. Hemant Soren, the head of JMM and a former chief minister, is now serving a prison sentence for corruption. He pushed the Congress to give Sarfaraj Ahmad’s party the seat. In order to run his wife Kalpana Soren for the Gandey Assembly Constituency, Soren recently forced Sarfaraz to step down as an MLA.

Sarfaraz was offered a nomination to the Rajya Sabha in exchange. The Congress requested the seat when it became available since it is part of the party’s quota. As part of his strategy to keep the coalition government in place in the state after Sarfaraz resigned, Soren informed the Congress leadership that he had previously guaranteed Sarfaraz the seat. According to sources, the Congress leadership chose not to pursue the issue after learning that many of its MLAs in Jharkhand are dissatisfied and that some of them have even spoken with the BJP.

The party did not want Jharkhand to become another Himachal Pradesh. The two allies from Jharkhand had previously battled over a Rajya Sabha seat. When the last vacancy occurred, the opposition was so strong that Avinash Pande, the AICC national secretary in charge of Jharkhand at the time, ordered the party’s MLAs to boycott the chief minister for two months in an effort to put pressure on him to resign from his position in favor of the party. But Soren refused to back down and sat down. The Congress leadership has made the decision to give in to the JMM and not upset the apple cart in another state, since the party’s MLAs’ desertions are endangering the party’s administration in Himachal Pradesh.

Tales of Coalition

Expanding government upon return from the UK, Nitish

Nitish Kumar, the chief minister of Bihar, will grow his government upon his March 13 return from the United Kingdom. The chief minister postponed the expansion of his ministries for more than a month in an attempt to put pressure on the BJP, his coalition partner, over his insistence on conducting state assembly elections concurrently with the Lok Sabha elections.

The leadership of the BJP believes that holding simultaneous elections would divert its supporters from the Lok Sabha elections, which are its main objective. According to sources, the chief minister has consented to support his coalition partner’s position on the matter. On January 28 of current year, Nitish had sworn in for a record-tying ninth time.

Eight ministers took oaths beside him, including three each from the JD(U) and the BJP, one from Jitan Ram Manjhi’s Hindustan Awam Morch, and one independent. The primary departments have been split between the BJP and JD(U). However, the whole ministry is still under formation. Sources claim that the chief minister has given in to the BJP’s demand to separate the state and national elections.