Advani faces difficult Rajya Sabha poll options

New Delhi: It is once again Lal Krishna Advani versus Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological mentor of his rightwing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

The veteran leader and RSS are locked in a tussle over the nomination of candidates for the biannual Rajya Sabha elections due in April when 60 lawmakers are due to retire.

Based on its strength in various provincial assemblies, BJP is assured of winning 16 of these seats.

Hectic lobbying has already started to grab the nomination. The party is assured of winning one seat each from Punjab, Bihar, Jharkhand, Orissa, Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan and three seats each from Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh.

If BJP circles are to be believed, Advani wants senior journalist M.J. Akbar to be nominated for one of the seats, which is not acceptable to RSS. It, instead, wants maverick politician Subramanian Swamy to enter the Rajya Sabha. Interestingly, both Akbar and Swamy were vocal critics of the BJP and its policies and have of late moved closer to the rightwing organisation.

Akbar was elected to the Lok Sabha in 1989 on the Congress party ticket and lost his Katihar seat in Bihar in the next general election. He even served as the spokesman of the Congress party. After Rajiv Gandhi's assassination he went back to journalism.

Swamy, on the other hand, started his career as a member of the Jan Sangh, the predecessor to BJP. He, however, turned a bitter critic of BJP and was responsible for engineering the downfall of the BJP-led coalition government in 1998, leading to fresh polls. He has edged closer to RSS with his opposition to the Ram Sethu ship canal project.