Presidential Poll: Yashwant Sinha is Joint Opposition Candidate, BJP May Name VP Venkaiah Naidu
NEW DELHI, June 21: The former union finance and external affairs minister in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee cabinet Yashwant Sinha, currently the vice-president of Trinamool Congress, has been named the joint opposition candidate for the presidential elections.
Though the ruling alliance, the NDA is yet to name its presidential nominee, the developments in Delhi on Tuesday indicated that the BJP could be considering to elevate the vice-president Venkaiah Naidu to the Rashtrapati Bhavan.
Sinha, a bureaucrat-turned-politician, was named the joint candidate of the opposition parties after a meeting of the leaders of various parties at the residence of the veteran politician and the Nationalist Congress Party president Sharad Pawar in Delhi on Tuesday morning.
In a joint statement, leaders of the opposition parties appealed to the BJP and its allies to support Sinha “so we can have a worthy ‘Rashtrapati’ elected unopposed.”
Sinha was the finance minister and later external affairs minister in the Vajpayee cabinet from 1998 to 2004. Born on November 6, 1937, Mr Sinha attended school and university in Patna. In 1958, he completed his Masters in Political Science from Patna University and taught Political Science at his alma-mater from 1958 to 1960.
In 1960, he joined the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) and held several posts during his 24-year tenure. Sinha eventually resigned from the IAS in 1984 and joined active politics as a member of the Janata Party. He was appointed its All-India General Secretary in 1986 and elected to the Rajya Sabha in 1988 and in 1993 joined the BJP where he remained till 2018 when he resigned following serious differences with the present BJP leadership. He had joined the TMC just before the West Bengal Assembly elections last year and was named the party’s vice-president. On Tuesday, he quit the party after he was named the joint opposition candidate for the top office in the country.
His candidature was announced by the Congress leader Jairam Ramesh after the opposition meet. Soon after Sinha hinted that he had accepted the offer and as per the wish of various opposition parties quit the TMC to become an independent candidate.
While the TMC had pitched Sinha’s name, the Congress and Left parties had been insisting that the former BJP leader first resign from his party post to emerge as a more acceptable face. Before Sinha, Sharad Pawar, the former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Farooq Abdullah and the former West Bengal governor Gopalkrishna Gandhi had declined the opposition’s offer to become their presidential candidate.
A flurry of activities was also witnessed in the BJP camp with the union minister Amit Shah calling on the party’s national president J P Nadda and the two later went to Naidu’s residence where the defence minister Rajnath Singh was also president. The BJP sources said this could be an indication that the party could be considering putting up Naidu as its presidential candidate. With the numbers in Parliament and various legislative assemblies strongly favoured the NDA, the BJP’s nominee for the post is almost certain to be elected the next president.
(Manas Dasgupta)
