Janjivan Bureau / New Delhi : All aspirants for the grand old party’s tickets for 2019 Lok Sabha elections have been mandated to pay a fixed application fee to be able to enter the candidate nomination process formally.
The application fee for Congress LS nomination in Himachal Pradesh is as high as Rs 50,000 for general category aspirants and Rs 35,000 for reserved category applicants.
This fee is double of Rs 25,000 charged for Congress parliamentary election nomination in 2014.
In Punjab and Chandigarh, the LS ticket application fee for aspirants has been fixed at Rs 35,000 each for general category contestants and Rs 25,000 for Scheduled Caste category.
This is also significantly higher than 2014 LS polls when the ticket fee was a nominal of Rs 10,000 in the general class and Rs 5000 for the reserved class.
“All candidates will have to pay this application fee,” Himachal Pradesh Congress Committee president Kuldeep Singh Rathore told The Tribune.
In Punjab, state unit chief Sunil Jakhar said the idea behind fixing a fee is to ensure candidates’ interest in the nomination and electoral process and to maintain a level of seriousness in the exercise.
Chandigarh Territorial Congress president Pradeep Chhabra also confirmed to The Tribune that Rs 35,000 application fee was being charged this time.
He added that the candidates who had applied earlier without a fee – including former ministers Pawan Kumar Bansal, Manish Tewari and the wife of Punjab Local Bodies Minister Navjot Kaur Sidhu – had been asked to send the money to complete their applications.
“The fee is mandatory. Those who did not submit the fee earlier have been telephonically informed about the compulsory condition for a fee and they are all in the process of sending their cheques,” Chhabra said.
AICC sources meanwhile indicated that the decision to enhance Congress’ LS ticket application fee was mainly rooted in the party’s weak financial health.
“It’s a way to fill AICC’s shallow coffers. The party has been struggling for funds for a long time. Mandating a fee with LS ticket applications is one way of ensuring clean money ahead of polls,” a Congress source said.
The fee is non refundable.
In an interview to The Tribune last week, former Finance Minister P Chidambaram, who is part of the Congress core committee for LS election strategy, listed lack of financial resources as the party’s biggest challenge in the forthcoming polls.
Asked what the Congress’ mightiest challenge ahead of 2019 General Election was, Chidambaram said, “Resources, the fact that the BJP has got massive resources. Even going by the published figures of electoral bonds, the BJP has got massive resources.”
