Elections for 58 Rajya Sabha seats were held today to fill vacancies that will arise after the retirement of Upper House members early next month in UP, Maharashtra, Bihar, West Bengal, MP, Gujarat, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Rajasthan, Odisha, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh & Uttarakhand.
AMN / LUCKNOW / NEW DELHI
In a keenly contested elections the BJP today won 9 seats while Samajwadi Party’s Jaya Bachchan won one with 38 votes.
BJP winners from UP are Arun Jaitley, Ashok Bajpai, Vijaya Pal Singh Tomar, Sakal Deep Rajbhar, Kanta Kardam, Anil Jain, Harnath Singh Yadav and GVL Narsimha Rao.
Anil Agarwal of the BJP has won the tenth Rajya Sabha seat from Uttar Pradesh, defeating BSP’s BR Ambedkar in the counting of second preference votes. The BSP candidate got only 32 votes, five votes short of the required 37 votes while Agarwal got 16 votes in the first round that led to the counting of second preference votes, where Agarwal won. A win over Ambedkar in the high-stakes battle means the BJP has been able to exact revenge after losing the crucial Gorakhpur and Phulpur Lok Sabha seats to the SP this month in by-elections in which the latter had the backing of the BSP. As quid pro quo, the SP had decided to back the BSP in the bypoll, but Mayawati’s party still fell short and needed the support of Congress and a few on top of that. The week leading up to the election had seen hectic parleying as both sides tried to shore up the numbers.
Counting for the Rajya Sabha elections 2018 took place in seven states today.
In West Bengal all four TMC candidates – sitting Rajya Sabha member Nadimul Haque and first-time nominees Subhasish Chakraborty, Abir Biswas and Santanu Sen – emerged victorious.
* Congress’s Abhishek Manu Singhvi won the Rajya Sabha election from West Bengal. He called his victory “humbling and uplifting” and the result of “cooperation between different groups and MLAs.”
* MP Veerendra Kumar, the state president of the Janata Dal (U)’s Sharad Yadav faction, was elected to the Rajya Sabha from Kerala
*Candidates of Telangana’s ruling Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) – B Prakash, J Santosh Kumar and AB Lingaiah Yadav – bagged all three Rajya Sabha seats.
TDP leader CM Ramesh was unanimously elected to the Rajya Sabha in Andhra Pradesh, The Congress’s Dr L Hanumanthaiah, Dr Syed Naseer Hussain and G C Chandrasekhar and the BJP’s Rajeev Chandrashekar bagged the Rajya Sabha seats in Karnataka.
BJP’s Saroj Pandey won the Rajya Sabha election from Chhattisgarh by beating Congress’s Lekhram Sahu
For the 59 Rajya Sabha seats to be filled, 33 candidates from 10 states were declared elected unopposed. Results of West Bengal, Kerala, Chhattisgarh, Telangana, Karnataka, Jharkhand and Andhra Pradesh had already come in by the time the results for Uttar Pradesh were announced.