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Najma will be NDA’s choice again: Sushma

NEW DELHI: The National Democratic Alliance candidate for the Vice-President’s post, Najma Heptulla, will be the NDA’s choice for the position again when it is in a comfortable position to get her elected, Bharatiya Janata Party leader Sushma Swaraj has said. Speaking to a few reporters at a tea hosted by Ms. Heptulla, Ms. Swaraj said that keeping in mind the obvious difference between the electoral colleges for the Presidential and Vice-Presidential elections, the campaign this time was “intense but low profile.”

Ms. Heptulla had sent personal letters, along with her bio-data, to the roughly 780 members of both the Houses of Parliament. This had been followed up by telephone calls from her as well as party colleagues, she added. Most significantly, Ms. Swaraj conceded that although the NDA did not have the numbers to win this election, she would be the NDA candidate when the alliance would get the numbers to win the position. “If tomorrow we are in a position to get the Vice-Presidential position, it should be Najma’s,” Ms. Swaraj said. Ms. Heptulla made it clear that she was contesting this election because she considered it her privilege to be asked by her party to do so, but “not to make a claim in the future.”

Ms. Swaraj justified the contest on the grounds that the Congress had also contested the position in 2002, with Sushil Kumar Shinde contesting against Bhairon Singh Shekhawat. Yet another reason was that the ruling United Progressive Alliance had made no attempt to evolve a consensus taking the NDA along.

Even though the contest so far — with Hamid Ansari of the UPA and Rasheed Masood of the Samajwadi Party, the other two in the fight — has not degenerated into a war of words, on Monday an organisation describing itself as Friends for Education tried to remind people that Ms. Heptulla was the subject of an inquiry into an allegation that she had morphed the photograph of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad in her book “The Journey of a Legend” to place herself next to him. Firoze Bakht Ahmed, Chairperson of Friends for Education, has alleged that Ms. Heptulla had often wrongly projected herself as the closest living kin of the Maulana, when he, not she, was the closest living relative. He also charged her with destroying the Maulana’s legacy by joining the Bharatiya Janata Party.

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