Congress leader Sonia Gandhi on Wednesday filed the nomination for a Rajya Sabha seat from Rajasthan.

This will be her first stint in the Upper House of Parliament. The 77-year-old is currently serving her fifth term in the Lok Sabha, representing Uttar Pradesh’s Rae Bareli constituency.

Three Rajya Sabha seats in Rajasthan will become vacant when the terms of former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Bharatiya Janata Party leader Bhupendra Yadav end on April 3. The third seat fell vacant in December after BJP’s Kirori Lal Meena resigned following his victory in the Assembly election.

Considering the composition of the Rajasthan Assembly, which elects Rajya Sabha members from the state, the Congress is likely to win only one of the three seats. The BJP declared Madan Rathore and Chunnilal Garasiyaits as its nominees for the two other seats on Monday.

On Wednesday, the former Congress president was accompanied by party leaders Mallikarjun Kharge, Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra to file the nomination papers in Jaipur, The Hindu reported.

The decision to nominate Sonia Gandhi from Rajasthan is to not limit the party to southern states, The Hindu quoted an unidentified party leader as saying.

“Our [party] president Mallikarjun Kharge comes from Karnataka, our former president Rahul Gandhi is an MP from Wayanad,” a senior Congress leader told the newspaper. “We can’t have another former president to represent a southern state, as that would mean we are entirely giving up on the electoral battle in the north.”

The Congress failed to win any of the 25 Lok Sabha seats in Rajasthan in the 2014 and 2019 general elections.

Sonia Gandhi has been an MP from the Rae Bareli Lok Sabha seat since 2004. Before that, she represented the Amethi constituency between 1999 and 2004.