Election for one Rajya Sabha seat in Uttar Pradesh on Friday witnessed high drama, cross-voting and trade of charges between the ruling BJP and new-found allies Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party.
On Friday, biennial elections were held for 25 Rajya Sabha seats in six States including Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Karnataka, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Telangana.
Thirty-three candidates from ten States, including Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh and Odisha had already been declared elected unopposed on March 15. Of these, 16 seats had gone to the BJP.
The BJP-led NDA is still short of the majority mark of 126 in the 245-member Rajya Sabha, of which 233 members are elected and 12 are nominated.
Till results last came in, the BJP was comfortably placed to win eight out of ten seats in UP. The SP had won one seat. Counting was on for the tenth seat, for which the BSP’s Bhimrao Ambedkar was precariously placed.
With 311 seats in the 404-member Assembly, the BJP easily won eight seats. Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley was among the winners. To win, a candidate needs 37 votes in Uttar Pradesh. With 47 seats, the SP got its official candidate, Jaya Bachchan, elected. The BSP, which has only 19 MLAs in the House, needed additional numbers to get Ambedkar elected against the BJP’s Anil Agarwal.
However, both the BSP and the SP lost three crucial votes. The SP’s Nitin Agrawal voted in favour of the BJP because his father, Naresh Agarwal, had been denied the party’s nomination this time. BSP’s Unnao legislator Anil Singh also cross-voted in favour of the BJP. The SP’s Hari Om Yadav and the BSP’s Mukhtar Ansari, who are in prison, were denied permission to come out and vote. Ansari had earlier got permission from a lower court to vote but the government, in a dramatic late-evening decision on Thursday, got the Allahabad High Court to reverse this decision.
The math then was not favourable for the BSP’s candidate.
Trinamool dominance
In West Bengal, the Trinamool Congress got Nadimul Haque, Shantanu Sen, Shubhashish Chakravarty and Abir Ranjan Deb and the Congress’s Abhishek Manu Singhvi elected.
A candidate needs 49 votes to be elected from West Bengal where five seats were polled on Friday. The TMC, with 213 MLAs, had adequate votes to get four of its official candidates elected. It decided to transfer 17 superfluous votes in favour of the Congress. The Congress, with 42 seats, was short of seven votes.
In Jharkhand, the BJP was able to get Samir Uraon elected but in the contest between two millionaires — BJP’s Pradeep Senthalia and Congress’ Dheeraj Sahu — the latter emerged the winner. The Congress and the BJP got one seat each from the tribal State.
In Kerala, rebel Janata Dal (United) MP Veerendra Kumar was re-elected with the support of ruling CPI(M)-led LDF. The election was necessitated because Kumar had resigned from the Rajya Sabha protesting Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s desertion of the Grand Alliance with Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and the Congress to join the BJP.
For the lone seat in Chhattisgarh, the BJP’s Saroj Pandey was elected, defeating Lekhram Sahu of the Congress.