PUNE, 5 September 2006 — The Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) has decided to field party chief and Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar’s daughter, Supriya Sule, as its candidate for the Rajya Sabha (upper house) seat.
The seat fell vacant due to the death of senior NCP leader Vasant Chavan last month. Polls for the by-elections will be held on Sept. 18. NCP General Secretary D.P. Tripathi, while announcing Supriya’s candidacy, assured that she will win the election comfortably.
Tripathi further said that Supriya’s name was cleared after Pawar held consultations with senior party leaders, including civil aviation minister, Praful Patel.
The Congress party will not put its candidate for the election, sources said. This was decided during a meeting between Patel and Congress chief Sonia Gandhi.
The wife of the deceased leader, Nirmala Chavan, who had claimed that she deserves to be given the seat after the death of her husband, withdraw her claim and said that she would abide by the party's decision.
Supriya joined the NCP, a party founded by her father, in July and since then she was active in politics. Political analysts gauged her fast entry into politics, when she criticized the Congress-NCP-led Democratic Front government in Maharashtra for neglecting fund allocation for residential schools in under-developed areas of the state.
Though Supriya insisted that she is not a competitor to her cousin, Ajit Pawar, who is a Cabinet minister in the Maharashtra government, NCP leaders said that Pawar brought her into politics to clip the wings of his nephew Ajit, who was aspiring to be his heir.
