WEB DESK / AMN
The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Friday gained substantial strength in the Rajya Sabha winning eight of the 19 seats across eight states that went to polls. The party has earlier won three seats unopposed.
Former Union minister Jyotiraditya Scindia of the BJP, Congress leader Digvijaya Singh and former Jharkhand chief minister Shibu Soren were among the top politicians who emerged victorious even as high drama unfolded in Gujarat and Manipur, where the counting of votes began late amidst allegations of irregularities.
Rajya Sabha elections for the four seats of Gujarat almost became a nail-biter just like the November 2017 elections in which senior Congress leader Ahmed Patel was fighting for this fifth consecutive term in the upper House of Parliament.
However, while the circumstances were quite similar, the Congress could not replicate the same magic this time. Three of the four seats, which a few days ago could have been shared equally by the two parties given their strength in the Assembly, finally went to the BJP.
Abhay Bharadwaj, Ramila Bara and Narhari Amin of the BJP won, while Shaktisinh Gohil secured the sole victory from the Congress camp.
In the run up to the re-election bid of Patel also, a high-pitched drama was seen, in which the grand old party lost 15 of its MLAs, or one-fourth of its party strength in defections.
The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA), which had 90 members in the Rajya Sabha, has taken its tally to 101 in the 245-member Upper House, where the majority mark is 123. This is for the first time that the NDA tally in the Upper House has breached 100. The BJP alone will have 86 seats. The Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) will have 65 seats.
Elections to 24 seats in 10 states were initially scheduled for March 26, but they were deferred as India clamped a lockdown to stop the spread of the disease around that time. From the original list, four candidates in Karnataka, including former prime minister HD Devegowda, and one in Arunachal Pradesh were elected unopposed. Polling was held in the remaining seats on Friday. Altogether, the BJP won 11 of the 24 seats.
Personal protective equipment (PPE) and hand sanitizer were in supply in polling booths on Friday, and social distancing norms followed with nearly 1,000 legislators taking part in the polling process in the shadow of the pandemic.
In Manipur, the lone Rajya Sabha seat went to poll in the backdrop of an ongoing power tussle between the ruling BJP and the Congress. Fifty-two of the 59 members of the legislative assembly exercised their franchise with the BJP’s Sanajaoba Leishemba, the titular king of Manipur, securing 28 votes to defeat the Congress’s T Mangibabu, who got 24 votes.
In other states, results were along the expected lines with the ruling Congress foiling the BJP’s bid to such snatch an extra seat in Rajasthan. In the desert state, KC Venugopal and Neeraj Dangi of the Congress were declared winners. So was Rajendra Gehlot of the BJP.
The BJP fielded a second candidate, but he lost. Congress insiders praised deputy chief minister Sachin Pilot for winning two seats in the face of the BJP onslaught.
In Jharkhand, former chief minister Soren and the BJP’s Deepak Prakash won the two seats. K Vanlalvena, a candidate of BJP ally Mizo National Front (MNF), bagged the lone seat in Mizoram, while the National People’s Party’s (NPP) WR Kharlukhi won in Meghalaya. The lone BJP MLA in Mizoram did not turn up to vote for ally MNF.
In Andhra Pradesh, the ruling YSR Congress Party’s Pilli Subhash Chandra Bose, Mopidevi Venkata Ramana, Parimal Nathwani and Ayodhya Rami Reddy swept the four seats up for grabs.
Altogether 61 seats in the Rajya Sabha were filled this year with 43 first-timers being elected and 12 members getting re-elected. Apart from Scindia, other prominent first-timers included Mallikarjun Kharge and KC Venugopal of the Congress, and M Thambidurai of the AIADMK, among others. The 12 members who were re-elected included Bhubaneswar Kalita, a former Congress parliamentarian who switched sides to the BJP; Nationalist Congress Party chief Sharad Pawar; and Union minister Ramdas Athawale.