Elections to fill five Rajya Sabha seats in Punjab along with eight other elsewhere will be held on March 31, the Election Commission said on Monday.
The five seats to be filled from Punjab are falling vacant as Partap Singh Bajwa, Sukhdev Singh Dhindsa, Shamsher Singh Dullo, Naresh Gujral and Shwait Malik are retiring on April 9. Bajwa and Dullo are from the Congress, whereas Malik belongs to the BJP. Dhindsa and Gujral were elected from the SAD in 2016 but the former later quit the party.
The commission, in its statement, said that out of the five seats to be filled from Punjab, three are to be filled by holding one election and the other two through another election as these seats belong to two different biennial cycles. The notification for the biennial elections will be issued on March 14 and the last date of making nominations is March 21. Scrutiny of nominations will take place on March 22 and polling will be held on March 31.
The Rajya Sabha nominations from Punjab will depend on the performance of political parties in the February 20 elections, the results of which will be declared on March 10. Punjab has seven Rajya Sabha seats and the remaining two are scheduled to fall vacant on July 4 this year. There was no RS vacancy in the five-year rule of the Congress in the state.