New Delhi: The inclusion of top lawyer Ujjwal Nikam, former Foreign Secretary Harsh Vardhan Shringla, social worker C Sadanandan Masterand historian Meenakshi Jain in the President’s list of appointees as nominated members of the Rajya Sabha signals a calculated strategy by the Bharatiya Janata Party to signal inclusivity with an eye on key states while ensuring that it maintains ideological heft and numeric supremacy in the Upper House.
A notification informing of the President’s decision was issued by the Ministry of Home Affairs on Saturday night. The appointment of the new nominated MPs with a tenure of six years comes just a week ahead of the start of Monsoon Session of Parliament. The new MPs can join a party within six months of their nomination.
Of the eight nominated Rajya Sabha MPs, Gulam Ali and Satnam Sandhu, with their terms ending September 2028 and January 30 respectively, have joined the BJP. Justice (retired) Ranjan Gogoi’s term ends in March next year. Other nominated members include Veerendra Heggade, Ilaiyaraja, Vijayendra Prasad, PT Usha (term ends July 2028), and Sudha Murty (term ends March 2030).
The four new nominations fill all 12 seats in the nominated category while 4 seats from Jammu and Kashmir and one from Haryana remain vacant. In the 240-member House, BJP-led NDA enjoys a strength of 135 MPS, including one Independent and all 12 nominated MPs who have so far voted in the government’s favour.
The choice of nominated MPs also shows the BJP’s eye on key states that the party sees as crucial to its dominance of national politics. The four new appointments are from states (Kerala, West Bengal, Maharashtra and Delhi) the BJP sees as of key strategic importance.
Harsh Vardhan Shringla
Harsh Vardhan Shringla Shringla, a career diplomat and former Foreign Secretary, has been brought into the Rajya Sabha in view of his expertise in foreign affairs. A former Ambassador to the United States, Shringla also served as the Chief Coordinator for India’s G20 presidency and as High COmmissioner to Bangladesh during the Covid pandemic.
A part of the Centre’s recent global outreach after the Pahalgam terror attack, Shringla was earlier expected to take the political plunge and contest the 2024 Lok Sabha elections from West Bengal’s Darjeeling on a BJP ticket and participated in several programmes in the seat through his ‘Darjeeling Welfare Society’.
Ujjwal Nikam
Prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam, another high-profile appointment, enters the Rajya Sabha a year after he lost the Lok Sabha elections from Mumbai North Central on a BJP ticket. While he had previously represented the state in several high-profile cases like the 1993 Bombay blast, the 1997 Gulshan Kumar murder case and the 2006 murder of BJP leader Pramod Mahajan, he shot to national limelight after he tried Ajmal Kasab in the 26/11 Mumbai attacks case.
He quit as special public prosecutor in May 2024 to contest the Lok Sabha elections on a BJP ticket. However, he had started to withdraw himself from key cases including the 2011 Mumbai triple blast case and the 2014 Mohsin Shaikh murder case, in which the members of a Hindu outfit were accused. He was awarded the Padma Shri in 2016.
C Sadanandan Master
A BJP veteran from Kerala’s Kannur district, C Sadanandan Master in virtually hailed as a “living martyr” by the party after he lost both his legs in an attack allegedly carried out by Communist Party of India (Marxist) workers in 1994.
A teacher by profession, Sadanandan had also unsuccessfully contested elections in Kerala on a BJP ticket. He is a leader known to have close ties with the RSS, which has been making concerted attempts to make inroads into the state, and is also associated with the Bharatiya Vichara Kendram, a right-wing think tank run by senior Sangh leaders.
Meenakshi Jain
The appointment of Dr Meenakshi Jain, a former Associate Professor of Delhi’s Gargi College, is another significant choice that signals BJP’s ideological push, especially in the realm of modern history where it has been battling for an upper hand against the Left.
Conferred with the Padma Shri in 2020, Dr Jain is a renowned political scientist and was nominated to the Indian Council of Historical Research in 2014 by the Narendra Modi government. She is the daughter of former Times of India Editor Girilal Jain.
