Rajya Sabha to bid farewell to 72 retiring members today

New Delhi, Mar 31: Rajya Sabha will bid farewell to 72 members who are retiring and Chairman M Venkaiah Naidu and Prime Minister Narendra Modi will speak in the house on Thursday.

Leader of the House Piyush Goyal and Leader of the Opposition Mallikarjun Kharge will also speak and bid farewell to these 72 members, including seven nominated members. Naidu on Wednesday announced in the House that Zero Hour and Question Hour will not be taken up so as to enable the leaders and members speak on the occasion.

Sources said will host a dinner Thursday for all the members of Rajya Sabha at his official residence, where mementos will be presented to the 72 retiring members and another 19 who retired earlier who could not receive the mementos.

At the dinner, about six Rajya Sabha members will showcase their cultural talent, the sources said. While TMC's Santanu Sen will strum the guitar, his party colleague Dola Sen will present Rabindra Sangeet, the sources said, adding DMK's Tiruchi Siva will sing a Tamil song and BJP's Roopa Ganguly a Hindi song. Ramachandra Jhangra will sing a patriotic song while NCP's Vandana Chavan will sing a Hindi song during the cultural evening. These individual performances will be followed by a chorus.

Senior officials of Rajya Sabha Secretariat said that the members of the House will showcase their cultural talents after a gap of 20 years on such an occasion.

Some of the members retiring in April include deputy leader of the Congress Anand Sharma, A K Antony, Subramanian Swamy, M C Mary Kom and Swapan Dasgupta while the terms of Nirmala Sitharaman, Suresh Prabhu, M J Akbar, Jairam Ramesh, Vivek Tankha, V Vijayasai Reddy will end in June.

Among the members retiring in July are Piyush Goyal, Muktar Abbas Naqvi, P Chidambaram, Ambika Soni, Kapil Sibal, Satish Chandra Misra, Sanjay Raut, Praful Patel and K J Alphons. While some union ministers and BJP leaders will be renominated by the ruling party, there is no clarity on some renomination of the Congress members, some of whom are of the G-23 which has been critical of the party leadership.