Sanjay Singh To Get AAP's Rajya Sabha Ticket, Kumar Vishwas Gets A Hint

NEW DELHI: Senior Aam Aadmi Party leader Sanjay Singh, 45, will be the party's nominee for one of the three Rajya Sabha seats from next month but the Arvind Kejriwal-led AAP will make a formal announcement next week when it firms up names for the other two seats.

Kumar Vishwas, whose supporters had camped at the party office to demand a seat for him on Thursday, is unlikely to be on that list, AAP sources told NDTV.

The poet-politician, who has thrown his hat in the ring, told ndtv.com in October that he could not be faulted for wanting to be in the Rajya Sabha as the party's voice. In the upper house, Kumar Vishwas had promised, he would be an articulate voice against the BJP and the Congress.

Arvind Kejriwal hasn't spoken about the party's candidates all these days. But Mr Kejriwal did send a message - said to be targeted at Kumar Vishwas, seen as the party's loudest aspirant for a ticket to the Rajya Sabha - when he retweeted a 27-second video clip from an old interview.

In this, Mr Kejriwal says there was no place for people who joined the party for a party ticket or official post. "They joined the wrong party," he adds in the video.

This was on the same day supporters of Kumar Vishwas had camped in the party office.

The decision to send Sanjay Singh, a mechanical engineer who spent years campaigning for street vendors before co-founding AAP in 2012, will leave only two seats up for grabs. Former journalist Ashutosh, could be named for the second seat.

AAP's blockbuster victory in the 2015 Delhi election guarantees that all the three seats in the upper house that fall vacant in January-end will accrue to the party. The certainty of success, Chief Minister Kejriwal had initially hoped, would encourage eminent professionals to readily accept its offer to become its candidate.

But this plan hasn't taken off, yet.

Seven professionals, AAP's A-listers including former Reserve Bank of India Governor Raghuram Rajan and former Chief Justice of India TS Thakur, have already declined to be the party's voice in the Rajya Sabha.

If the party clears Ashutosh's name also, it would only leave one seat for an outsider.

AAP leaders said the party's political affairs committee would meet next week to formally decide the three names.