How BJP is fielding Preeti Mahapatra for Rajya Sabha to scuttle Sibal's chances

It was a smooth sailing for all the candidates of Rajya Sabha in Uttar Pradesh, including the Congress Rajya Sabha candidate from UP, Kapil Sibal, till Preeti Mahapatra, an Independent candidate with support of the BJP, threw her hat into the ring.

There were 11 Rajya Sabha candidates from UP: Samajwadi Party - seven, Bahujan Samaj Party - two, Congress - one, Bharatiya Janata Party - one.

In fact, all would have sailed through but for Preeti Mahapatra. She filed her nomination with support from the BJP and became the 12th candidate thus necessitating a vote.

The kind of across party-line support which Preeti Mahapatra got while filing her nomination shows how fluid the situation is when it comes to voting and you can't be sure of how many votes you have got till they are counted.

So, who is this Preeti Mahapatra and why is the BJP supporting her?

Preeti Mahapatra is married to Mumbai-based developer Harihara Mahapatra and she describes herself as a "social worker" and is the founder of the NGO, Krishnaleelaa Foundation. The BJP calls her an "Independent with no links to the party" but a look at her Facebook account reveals a completely different story.

The cover picture on her FB account is with Prime Minister Narendra Modi taken in February 2014, whom she calls her "idol and mentor". Apart from that photo, there are pictures with Gujarat CM Anandiben Patel.

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Moreover, there are also pictures of her NGO, which claims to have built 10,000 plus toilets in Gujarat's Navsari district under Modi's flagship Swachh Bharat Abhiyan. She describes herself as a member of the PM's Vichar Manch. So, despite the mutual denial both from Preeti as well as the BJP, the connections are too much to ignore.

So why is BJP para-dropping her to upset all the Rajya Sabha calculations?

According to highly placed sources within the BJP, the party wants to spoil the road for Congress' Kapil Sibal for one and only reason. Sibal's defeat would mean one less vote from the Grand Old Party in the Upper House, where the BJP is short of strength and struggles against Congress' heavyweights.

The BJP's experience with Congress in Rajya Sabha is so bitter that they would prefer to have regional parties getting more seats. They feel that with the regional parties, they have more room for manoeuvering than with the Congress.

UP is not the only place where they have tried to queer the pitch for the Congress candidate. In Madhya Pradesh also, they have put a candidate against Congress' candidate Vivek Tankha.

So is this the end of road for Kapil Sibal?

Definitely not.

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This has just added a degree of anxiety as the level of cross-voting is rampant and before Preeti joined the race, Sibal's entry to upper house was almost certain.

The arithmetic of the Upper House is such that one needs 34 votes to get an entry and the Congress has 29 MLAs. So officially, Sibal needs five more to scrape through.

With 80 seats and two Rajya Sabha candidates, the BSP has 12 extra votes. Apart from this, there are eight votes of the RLD, in addition to six Independents. There are smaller parties such as the Peace Party, which has four, and Quami Ekta Dal, which as two votes, apart from a couple of other smaller parties.

However, not just for Kapil Sibal, Preeti Mahapatra has also raised heckles of Samajwadi Party, as the latter had fielded seven candidates and it is also eight votes short.

Notwithstanding the math, it looks like the SP would sail through; since the RLD, for a bigger pie in 2017 UP Assembly elections, may go the whole hog and let the SP have all its eight votes.

Sources say that the Congress is also in touch with the BSP and is also hopeful of Independents voting for them, but no final decision has been made yet.

According to senior leaders cutting across party lines, entry of Preeti Mahapatra into the Rajya Sabha race has brought in all kinds of permutations and combinations into the picture. Money power will be in full display as will be the cross-voting.

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According to Pramod Tiwari, "Nomination of Preeti Mahapatra has exposed the real face of the BJP and they have corrupted the electoral system".

However, equations remain unstable still since even though the BJP is supporting Mahapatra, this so-called Independent also has the backing of one BSP MLA among others, thereby keeping the game split wide open.

Preeti, with her contacts among the top BJP leadership, including PM Modi, will definitely not leave any stone unturned to make sure that she gets the required 23 votes.

People in the know feel that this is exactly a situation where in all kind of "allurements" come into play, and the BJP, which is also gearing up to fight an important Assembly election in UP in 2017, will give this its best shot.

An upset here for the Congress can be a big boost for the BJP. But in this risky game, no party is entirely secure and there are likely chances that the BJP may itself see some vote splitting in its own rank.

This has also raised the stakes for the Samajwadi Party, which is in power in Uttar Pradesh. Sources say that the SP is actively mulling over withdrawing one candidate so that all, especially Sibal, sail through peacefully.

However, it also wants to avoid the prospect of having a candidate lose in the upper house, where the situation is extremely fluid. If the SP's own candidate loses, there could be egg on the face of the Akhilesh Yadav-led state government in UP.

So, either they are banking on assured votes from the Independents and the RLD, or they are hoping to cut their losses and move on. This would be clear by the evening of June 3, which is the last day of withdrawing nominations.

But until any such concrete action is taken, it's going to be an anxious wait for all the 12 candidates in the fray.