NEW DELHI, MARCH 8: Fractured mandates in three State Assemblies may open the doors of the country's most exclusive political club, the Rajya Sabha, to businessmen with generous purses.Among those in the race are liquor baron Vijay Mallya, hotelier Lalit Suri, Zee TV's Jawahar Goel and industrialist Jayant Malhoutra.Political lines are blurring rapidly with these wannabe MPs lobbying hard with individual MLAs across the spectrum to mop up floating votes in the hung assemblies of Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh. Corporate hopefuls from the third state, Bihar, are waiting for the pieces of the political jigsaw in Patna to fall into place before declaring themselves.The trend for the breakdown of party barriers was set by Suresh Kalmadi who pulled off an unexpected victory as an Independent candidate in Maharashtra in 1998 by pulling in surplus votes from all sides, thereby defeating the official Congress nominee, R D Pradhan. He joined the Congress subsequently but has become the role model for politically ambitious businessmen without party affiliations.The Rajya Sabha polls are on March 29 and the last date for filing nomination papers is March 14. Of the 58 seats for which elections are due, as many as six are up for grabs as no party has the requisite assembly strength to win them. Two are in UP, two in Maharashtra and two in Bihar.Maharashtra's six seats, for instance are divided as follows. The Shiv Sena, BJP, Congress and NCP have one sure seat each. The Shiv Sena-BJP and Congress-NCP alliances can both win one more if the partners agree on a common candidate. Given their underlying hostility towards each other, this seems unlikely.It opens a window of opportunity for businessmen with the right attitude and the talent for permutations and combinations in a game of numbers with surplus votes. Mallya and Goel are the main contenders for the two extra seats.Mallya has two strings to his bow. He is also lobbying for a Congress ticket from his home state of Karnataka through Chief Minister S M Krishna to whom he is related by marriage. According to Congress sources, he has even kept a third option for himself in Orissa where the party is eleven votes short of a seat. However, Congress circles feel J B Patnaik loyalist Pinaki Mishra is better suited to pull off the Orissa seat despite the heavy odds against the party.The UP scenario is much like Maharashtra. Eleven seats are vacant. The division is as follows: five clear seats to the BJP, three to the Samajwadi Party and one to the BSP. The floating votes are in the Loktantrik Congress, the Jantantrik BSP, Ajit Singh's Rashtriya Lok Dal, the Congress and the Left Parties and they all add up to two seats.Among those in the race for the surplus in the UP kitty are Suri and Malhoutra. The latter was a BSP nominee the last time round. Now he is in the Independent category, having fallen out with Mayawati. Suri is being pushed by the Jitendra Prasad faction in the UP Congress.The Loktantrik Congress may, however, put a spoke in their plans. This breakaway Congress group headed by Naresh Aggarwal is said to be thinking of sponsoring television journalist Rajeev Shukla if he can drum up the rest of the numbers he needs from the floating votes.The race is on in right earnest and if these outsiders to the world of politics pull it off, they may set a precedent which could ultimately change the character of the Rajya Sabha from the House of Elders to an extension of the Chatterati Club.
