Till when will the nominated seats of Rajya Sabha stay vacant?

New Delhi: Many seats of nominated category in Rajya Sabha are still vacant. But instead of nominating the members for each seat at once, the central govt is nominating the leaders in bits and pieces. A total of 12 members are nominated in the RS. There are now nine members. Ghulam Ali Khatana of J&K has been nominated as the tenth member, whose oath is pending. Before him, three seats were vacant, so it seemed that three members would be nominated together. But that did not happen. Khatana has been nominated alone. Before that, four people were nominated.

Recently, the central govt nominated four people from four states of South India to the Upper House. PT Usha from Kerala, Dr. Virendra Hegde from K’taka, Vijayendra Prasad from Telangana and Ilaiyaraja from TN were sent to the Upper House. Apart from the five new members, including Khatana, the five members, including former Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi, and four have joined the BJP. The names of these four people are – Rakesh Sinha, Sonal Mansingh, Mahesh Jethmalani and Ram Shakal. Now the eyes of many people are on the remaining two seats. For the first time in a long time, no journalist is in the nominated category members. Swapan Dasgupta retired a few days back. No member from Hindi film industry is in the nominated category. It will be interesting to see whether the remaining two seats are nominated in one go or one by one.