E-Paper
After Lok Sabha loss, Sunetra Pawar to enter Rajya Sabha
Maharashtra deputy chief minister Ajit Pawar’s wife Sunetra Pawar, who lost the recently concluded Lok Sabha polls from Baramati, is all set to make her legislative debut through the Rajya Sabha, where bypoll to one seat from Maharashtra and biennial elections to three Kerala seats are scheduled on June 25.
Maharashtra deputy chief minister Ajit Pawar’s wife Sunetra Pawar, who lost the recently concluded Lok Sabha polls from Baramati, is all set to make her legislative debut through the Rajya Sabha, where bypoll to one seat from Maharashtra and biennial elections to three Kerala seats are scheduled on June 25. The nomination process ended on Thursday.
In Maharashtra, the bypoll was necessitated after NCP leader Praful Patel vacated his seat and switched to another berth in the Rajya Sabha. If elected, Pawar will retain the seat for four years till July 2028, as against the normal six-year term.
In Kerala, both the Congress and the CPI(M) have fielded their regional allies in the biennial polls to the three seats, currently held by the Left party and its partners. IUML, a partner of the Congress, is likely to bag one seat which is currently held by CPI(M)’s floor leader Elamaram Kareen. In the remaining two seats, Jose K Mani of the Kerala Congress has been renominated while the CPI has replaced its outgoing lawmaker Binoy Viswam with PP Suneer.
After the biennial polls, the CPI(M) will have only four members in the Rajya Sabha.
The Rajya Sabha secretariat has also notified 10 vacancies in the Upper House — two each in Assam, Bihar and Maharashtra, and one each in Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Tripura — after its members switched over to the Lok Sabha in the recent general elections.
To be sure, polling for these 10 seats has not been scheduled yet by the Election Commission.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the single largest party in the Upper House with 90 members, is hopeful of retaining bulk of these 10 vacancies, however, it will face a tough contest in Haryana.
In Maharashtra, two seats that have fallen vacant after Piyush Goyal and Chhatrapati Udayanraje Bhosale were elected to the Lok Sabha. The BJP can easily retain both the seats as the combined strength of the NDA is 203 while the opposition has just 69 legislators in the 288-member assembly that currently has 14 vacancies.
In Bihar, two seats — held by RJD’s Misa Bharti and BJP’s Vivek Thakur — are vacant. While the BJP-led NDA has 133 MLAs in the 243-member assembly as against the 105 of the RJD-led opposition, the BJP and RJD are set to bag one seat each.
In the 90-member Haryana assembly, the BJP has 41 members, the Congress has 29 and the JJP, with which snapped ties with the BJP ahead of the Lok Sabha polls, has 10 MLAs and there are five Independent legislators and one MLA each from the Indian National Lok Dal (INLD) and the Haryana Lokhit Party (HLP).
