On Wednesday the AAP made a pretty sensational manoeuvre by approaching former RBI Governor and famous economist Raghuram Rajan to offer him a Rajya Sabha seat.
3 Rajya Sabha seats from Delhi fall vacant in Delhi next January and AAP having the brute majority of 66 seats in the 70 member assembly, is firm favourites to grab them. Currently the incumbents include Congress nominees, Dr Karan Singh, Janardhan Dwivedi and Pervez Hashmi, who would be completing their six year term on 27 January 2018.
Reports claimed that AAP wasn’t planning on filling those seats with its leaders and wanted to nominate rank outsiders like Rajan, an eminent jurist and a known face from the field of social service.
This may have been a strategy of the AAP to provide a new face to the party, going into the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
But this plan isn’t off to a good start as, based on reports [1][2] Raghuram Rajan has declined AAP’s offer as he plans to continue to remain in academics. As per reports, the communication department of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business while speaking on behalf of Rajan stated that:
While Professor Rajan is engaged in a variety of educational activities in India, he has no plans to leave his full-time academic job at the University of Chicago
It remains to be seen how AAP takes this possible setback to its plans and whether it will line up another distinguished face as a replacement.
Rajya Sabha has in recent days emerged as one of the key plans of the AAP at-least for the near future.
We had recently speculated how this upcoming vacancy in the state’s 3 Rajya Sabha seats might be the reason why the party is trying all tactics to delay a verdict in the “Office for profit” case, which might lead to the the disqualification of 21 of its MLAs. Such a disqualification might mean that the party may struggle to win those seats.