Narayanan To File Nomination Today

The Vice-President, K R Narayanan, will file his nomination today for the July 14 presidential election as the joint candidate of the United Front and the Congress, sources indicated yesterday.

A front delegation led by parliamentary affairs minister Srikanta Jena met Narayanan yesterday to get his signatures on the nomination papers.

The sources said two sets of 50 proposers and seconders each were likely to be filed separately by the Front and the Congress declaring their support for the candidature of Narayanan for the countrys highest office.

The Front proposers for Narayanan were Prime Minister I K Gujral and Union ministers Indrajit Gupta, Ramvilas Paswan, P Chidambaram, Chaturanan Mishra, Murasoli Maran, S Venugopalachari, R L Jalappa, Satpal Maharaj, Sisram Ola and B B Ramaiah.

The Front and the Congress account for nearly 62 per cent of the votes in the 4,848 strong electoral college consisting of elected members of the Lok Sabha, the Rajya Sabha and the state legislatures.

Narayanans nomination has also been proposed by four Front Chief Ministers, N Chandrababu Naidu (Andhra Pradesh), Jyoti Basu (West Bengal), Laloo Prasad Yadav (Bihar) and Prafulla Kumar Mohanta (Assam) and other prominent Front leaders, G K Moopanar (TMC) and Somnath Chatterjee (CPI-M).

The sources said that the 52 seconders for Narayanan included Srikanta Jena, C M Ibrahim, Saifuddin Soz, B S Ramoowalia, Chandradeo Prasad Verma, Jayanti Natarajan, Kanti Singh and Ratnamala Savnoor. The Front convenor, Naidu, had sent the nomination papers to Hyderabad to obtain signatures for the requried number of proposers and seconders.

Of the 51 front proposers, 29 belonged to Telugu Desam. Among the 52 seconders, TDP accounted for 18.

Meanwhile, for the first time since filing of nominations for the presidential election opened last week, Narendra Nath Dubey Adig of Varanasi filed his

nomination papers yesterday with 50 proposers and seconders each.

Officials in the Lok Sabha secretariat, where the nominations were being filed, said the proposers and seconders of Dubey, an advocate, were MLAs mainly from UP, Orissa and Sikkim. All nomination papers would be subjected to scrutiny.

So far, 14 persons have filed their nomination papers. Dubey is the only candidate with the requisite proposers and seconders.