The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) on 3 January nominated Sanjay Singh, Sushil Gupta and ND Gupta as its Rajya Sabha nominees. The election for the Upper House will take place on 16 January.
The decision was taken at Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal’s residence in a meeting attended by around 56 party MLAs. The party's highest decision making body, the Political Affairs Committee (PAC), met soon after and formally approved the decision.
Here are AAP nominees for Rajya Sabha:
Sanjay Singh, Kejriwal’s
‘Go-To Person’
‘Aam aadmi ke saath ek aam aadmi’ – Reads AAP’s Rajya Sabha’s candidate Sanjay Singh’s bio on Twitter.
Singh is known as one of CM Arvind Kejriwal’s trusted lieutenants and his “go-to person” during times of conflict, said a CNN News18 report. He is currently AAP’s National Spokesperson and a member of the party’s Political Affairs Committee & National Executive. He is also in-charge of political affairs for Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.
Singh, a mechanical engineer by profession, has been a prominent AAP member who helped lay the party’s foundation in 2012.
Prior to this, he was a committee member of Team Anna and spoke on behalf of it during the India Against Corruption (IAC) movement, which later split due of differences of opinion between Anna Hazare and Kejriwal.
Sanjay Singh was born in 1972 in UP’s Sultanpur district in a family of teachers. He completed his diploma in Mining Engineering from Orissa School of Mining Engineering in 1990 and later on went on to become a social activist.
According to CNN News18, he participated in his first social movement in Keonjhar, Odisha, after which he started an organisation called ‘Sultanpur Samaj Sewa Sangathan’ in 1994.
Singh met Kejriwal in 2006 when the latter started his Right to Information (RTI) campaign. The two then became active members of the IAC movement in 2011.
Sanjay Singh was appointed in-charge of AAP’s Punjab unit, which he resigned from after the party lost in that state Assembly polls in April 2017.
He was also marred by a corruption controversy during Punjab bypolls. According to a Hindustan Times report, Punjab AAP member Paviter Singh alleged that Sanjay Singh demanded Rs 50 lakh from him for an Assembly election ticket to his wife.
Another HT report said that Sanjay Singh, along with another party member, was accused of discriminating against the party’s leaders and volunteers in Punjab.
Sushil Gupta
Sushil Gupta, a Delhi-based businessman, “has made big contributions in the education and health sectors in Delhi and Haryana,” said Delhi’s Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia. “He provides free education to 15,000 children,” Sisodia added during the press conference on 3 January.
An NSUI student activist in his college days, Gupta was a member of the Congress until three months ago. He had even contested the Delhi Assembly elections from Moti Nagar on a Congress ticket in 2013.
When asked about severing ties with the Congress, he told CNN News18, “I don’t believe in political parties. I believe in good people. I want to work in the health and education sector and I will go with anybody who lets me work in that sphere. When I quit Congress, I said I was open to all.”
He has been chairman of Punjabi Bagh Club for the last 25 years and chairman of the Punjabi Bagh Co-operative Housing Society for 13 years. He is also known to have a “wide-ranging business interests”.
His candidature may not go down well with other party members. An AAP MLA had told CNN News18 ahead of the announcement:
Gupta is not someone who is seen with a lot of respect. He often hosts politicians at the Punjabi Bagh Club. He comes from Congress. There are too many red flags.
ND Gupta
A chartered accountant by profession and author of accounting and business-related books, ND Gupta, like Sushil Gupta, is a fairly unknown face picked by AAP for the Upper House.
An alumnus of Delhi University’s Shri Ram College of Commerce, he was elected on the Board of International Federation of Accountants and is the former president of ICAI (Institute of Chartered Accountant of India).
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