Adani or wife may get Rajya Sabha nomination from AP

VIJAYAWADA: A member of industrialist Gautam Adani’s family — the magnate himself or wife Dr Priti Adani — will get a Rajya Sabha ticket from Andhra Pradesh, from where elections will be held for seats on June 10.

The YSRC will win all the four seats that will fall vacant, given its strength in the Assembly.

Chief Minister Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy has earlier given a Rajya Sabha ticket to Parimal Nathwani, senior group president of Reliance Industries, at the behest of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union minister Amit Shah.

Reliable sources said Jagan Mohan Reddy will accommodate industrialist Gautam Adani’s family as proposed by Amit Shah. The Union home minister, during a recent meeting, had discussed the chances of the YSRC giving an RS ticket to the Adanis and Jagan Mohan Reddy had agreed to do so.

The CM has also decided to retain YSRC general secretary V. Vijayasai Reddy in the Upper House. One seat will be given to the BC community, for which the name of Beeda Mastanrao of Nellore district is being proposed. For the fourth RS seat, there is a chance that the CM’s lawyer Niranjan Reddy will be nominated.

If the proposal for Niranjan Reddy fails to materialise, then former minister Killikrupa Rani belonging to North Andhra might be sent to the Rajya Sabha.

YSRC sources said that if the social engineering calculations changed at the last minute, then the fourth RS seat may go to a candidate from the minorities communities or an SC representative, in view of the 2024 elections.

According to YSRC sources, the CM finalised three names and would decide on the fourth candidate in two to three days.

The tenure of Vijayasai Reddy, and three BJP Rajya Sabha members Sujana Chaudhary and TG Venkatesh — who had defected from the TD — and Suresh Prabhu will end on June 21.

The YSRC has 150 seats in the 175-member Assembly while the Opposition TD has 23 seats and the Jana Sena one. The Atmakur constituency in the Nellore district fell vacant due to the death of minister Mekapati Goutham in February.

An average of 44  MLA votes are required to win each Rajya Sabha seat and it is clear that the YSRC will win all the four seats.

AP has 11 seats in the Rajya Sabha. Among them, there now are five YSRC members (excluding Vijayasai Reddy, whose term ends on June 21). The four Rajya Sabha seats that will be filled on June 10 will raise the strength of the YSRC from five to nine in the Upper House.

The RS terms of YSRC’s Vemireddy Prabhakar Reddy, TD's Kanakamedala Ravindra and BJP's C.M. Ramesh will end on April 22 next year. Elections for these three seats will be held before the 2024 general elections and it is likely that these three seats will also be clinched by the YSRC.