DW BUREAU / New Delhi Former union minister and veteran Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge will be the new Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, replacing senior party colleague Ghulam Nabi Azad who retires from the Upper House on February 15. The party has overlooked Azad's deputy in the Rajya Sabha Anand Sharma for the post. Congress sources said the name of Kharge, 78, as the party's nominee to the post was forwarded to the Rajya Sabha secretariat on Friday. Having held the portfolio of the railways minister in the second term of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government from 2009-2014, Kharge was also the Congress leader in the Lok Sabha from 2014 to 2019. Popularly known as "solillada Saradara", (a leader without defeat), this was the first electoral loss in Kharge's political life spanning several decades. He had won assembly elections in Karnataka nine times and the Lok Sabha twice before this defeat. He lost the 2019 Lok Sabha elections from Gulbarga in Karnataka but the party nominated him to the Rajya Sabha from his home state last year. The move had visibly angered Azad and Sharma along with several other senior leaders. A section in the Congress is of the view that the nomination of Kharge was one of the reasons for the dissension by 23 senior leaders, especially the Rajya Sabha members, replacing Azad as the LoP while ignoring Sharma. Both Azad and Sharma were said to be the prime movers of bringing a group of 23 leaders together to write a letter to Congress President Sonia Gandhi in August last year, seeking complete overhaul of the organisation and internal elections from top to bottom in the grand old party apart from a full-time and visible and active leadership. In the Rajya Sabha, the Congress has 37 members while the strength of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is 93. In the 245-member House, there are at present five vacancies ? two in Gujarat and one each in Assam, Bihar and Kerala. Out of these states, the Congress could win one of the two seats in Gujarat, held by senior leader Ahmed Patel till his death due to the Covid-19 in November 25 last year. Former law minister and senior Congress leader Salman Khurshid was among the first leaders to congratulate Kharge. (editor@dailyworld.in)