Sonia, Nadda among 41 elected unopposed to RS

NEW DELHI: Congress leader Sonia Gandhi, BJP president J P Nadda and Union Railways Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw were among 41 candidates elected unopposed to Rajya Sabha from different states on Tuesday.

The BJP has won the highest number of 20 seats, followed by the Congress (6), Trinamool Congress (4), YSR Congress (3), RJD (2), BJD (2) and NCP, Shiv Sena, BRS and JD(U) one each.

As there were no other candidates in the fray on these 41 seats, the respective returning officers declared them winners on the last date of withdrawal of nominations.

Former Congress president Sonia Gandhi who decided to give a miss to hurly burly of the coming Lok Sabha elections which are only a couple of months away mainly due to her health condition was declared elected unopposed to Rajya Sabha from Rajasthan.

BJP’s Chunnilal Garasiya and Madan Rathore were also elected unopposed to the Upper House from Rajasthan, state Assembly Secretary Mahaveer Prasad Sharma said in Jaipur.

The tenure of Rajya Sabha members former prime minister Manmohan Singh (Congress) and Bhupendra Yadav (BJP) is coming to an end on April 3. The third seat from Rajasthan fell vacant after the BJP MP Kirodi Lal Meena resigned from the House in December after being elected MLA. The BJP has 115 members and the Congress 70 in the 200-member Assembly. There are 10 Rajya Sabha seats in Rajasthan. After the results, Congress has six members and the BJP four.

From Odisha, Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw and Biju Janata Dal’s Debashish Samantray and Subhashish Khuntia were elected unopposed to the Rajya Sabha.

BJP candidate and Railways Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw was re-elected to the Upper House with the support of the ruling BJD. Though the BJD had the required numbers in the Odisha Assembly to win all the three Rajya Savha seats that fall vacant in April this year, the ruling party had preferred to field only two candidates leaving one berth for BJP’s Vaishnaw.

The Naveen Patnaik-led BJD had announced its support to Vaishnaw “for the larger interest of the state’s railways and telecom development”. In 2019 also, Patnaik had supported Vaishnaw when he got elected to the Rajya Sabha for the first time. In 2019, the BJD had supported Vaishnaw, a former Odisha cadre IAS officer, after Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke to Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik.

The tenure of three Rajya Sabha members - Vaishnaw, BJD’s Prashant Nanda and Amar Patnaik will end in April.

From Gujarat BJP president J P Nadda and three other candidates of the party were declared elected unopposed to the Rajya Sabha. There were four vacant Rajya Sabha seats in the state and as many candidates, all of the ruling BJP, had filed their nomination papers.

Apart from Nadda, the three others candidates elected unopposed to the Rajya Sabha were diamond baron Govindbhai Dholakia, BJP leaders Jasvantsinh Parmar and Mayank Nayak.

In Maharashtra, all six candidates in the fray for Rajya Sabha elections, including Congress turncoat Ashok Chavan, were declared elected unopposed.

Among the six, the BJP had fielded three nominees including Chavan, and the Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena and NCP one each. The opposition Congress had fielded one nominee. The BJP nominees declared elected unopposed include Chavan, former MLA Medha Kulkarni, and RSS worker Ajit Gopchade.

The nominees of Shiv Sena and Ajit Pawar-led Nationalist Congress Party are ex-Congress MP Milind Deora and Praful Patel, respectively. The Congress had nominated Dalit leader Chandrakant Handore, the lone candidate from the Opposition.

All four candidates in the fray for Rajya Sabha polls from Madhya Pradesh, including Union minister L Murugan and three others from BJP, were declared unopposed.

The four candidates from BJP include Union minister L Murugan, Valmiki Dham Ashram head Umesh Nath Maharaj, Kisan Morcha’s national vice president Banshilal Gurjar, and Madhya Pradesh BJP’s women wing president Maya Naroliya.

Along the same lines, all six candidates for Rajya Sabha polls in Bihar, three of them from BJP-led NDA and as many belonging to the opposition INDIA bloc, were elected unopposed to the Upper House. . The Vidhan Sabha secretariat handed over certificates to JD(U)’s Sanjay Kumar Jha, besides ally BJP’s Dharmshila Gupta and Bhim Singh. Certificates were also handed over to RJD’s Manoj Kumar Jha and Sanjay Yadav, in addition to Akhilesh Prasad Singh of the Congress.

While Manoj Kumar Jha and Akhilesh Prasad Singh, who heads the state unit of Congress, will enjoy second consecutive terms, the remaining four shall be making their parliamentary debut.

In the evening, TMC’s Sushmita Dev, Sagarika Ghose, Mamata Thakur and Md Nadimul Haque and Samik Bhattacharya (BJP) were declared winners from West Bengal. The YSR Congress won all the three seats in Andhra Pradesh - G Babu Rao, Y V Subba Reddy and M Raghunath Reddy while in neighbouring Telangana, the ruling Congress bagged two seats - Renuka Chowdhury and Anil Kumar Yadav - and BRS one seat - V Ravichandra.

BJP nominees in Uttarakhand (Mahendra Bhatt), Subhash Barala (Haryana), Devendra Pratap Singh (Chhattisgarh) were elected unopposed.

The biennial elections were announced for February 27 in 56 seats. While 50 members will retire on April 2, six will do so on April 3. Now polling will be held for 10 seats in Uttar Pradesh, four in Karnataka and one seat in Himachal Pradesh from 9 am to 4 pm and counting will be held on the same day from 5 pm onwards.

Uttar Pradesh will see 11 candidates vying for 10 seats. The BJP has fielded eight candidates - former Union minister R P N Singh, former MP Chaudhary Tejveer Singh, state party general secretary Amarpal Maurya, former state minister Sangeeta Balwant, party spokesperson Sudhanshu Trivedi, former MLA Sadhna Singh, former Agra mayor Naveen Jain and local industrialist and former SP leader Sanjay Seth who joined the BJP in 2019.

The Samajwadi Party (SP) has renominated Jaya Bachchan and also announced the candidature of former MP Ramjilal Suman and retired IAS officer Alok Ranjan.

In Karnataka, five candidates are contesting for the four seats. The Congress has fielded Ajay Maken, Syed Naseer Hussain and GC Chandrasekhar, while Narayansa Bandage is the BJP candidate. JD(S) leader and former Rajya Sabha member D Kupendra Reddy is also in the fray.

In Himachal Pradesh, the BJP has forced a contest by fielding Harsh Mahajan against Congress’s Abhishek Manu Singhvi for the single seat despite not having enough MLAs to win.