Bangalore:
Rajeev Gowda, a 50-year-old IIM professor is headed to Parliament. He has been nominated to the Rajya Sabha by the Congress from Karnataka, which has four upper house vacancies.
Elections for the four seats will be held on June 19, and there will not be a contest as only four people have filed nominations.
Mr Gowda is a Congress spokesman seen as close to party vice president Rahul Gandhi and teaches Economics and Social Sciences at the IIM, Bangalore. The Congress has chosen youth over experience in picking him to replace the 84-year-old former union minister SM Krishna.
The party has also renominated BK Hariprasad, who has been a Rajya Sabha MP from the state for the last six years. He is 59.
Mr Gowda, like SM Krishna, belongs to the dominant Vokkaliga community. He had contested for a party ticket in one of the Congress' experimental primaries in the Bangalore North constituency, but Congress workers, who selected the candidate, voted for a former MP C Narayanaswamy, who ultimately lost to Sadananda Gowda of the BJP, who is now a Union minister in the Narendra Modi government at the Centre.
Mr Gowda comes from a family of Congressmen. He has a PhD from Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania in USA and is an expert in Public Policy and Management. He serves as a Director on the Central Board of the Reserve Bank of India.
Apart from Mr Gowda and Mr Hariprasad of the Congress, the BJP's Prabhakar Kore has filed nomination, as has real estate magnate Kupendra Reddy, a Congressman till very recently, who has been nominated by the Janata Dal (Secular).
Each MP needs the support of 45 members in 224-seat Karnataka assembly. The Congress, which has 121 assembly seats can guarantee only two and is not nominating a third. So the BJP and the JD(S) are confident of winning one seat each.