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Pawar, Athawale enter Rajya Sabha
New Delhi: Ruling and opposition party candidates for the Rajya Sabha elections sailed through unopposed in Maharashtra, West Bengal, Assam, Himachal Pradesh, Tamil
New Delhi: Ruling and opposition party candidates for the Rajya Sabha elections sailed through unopposed in Maharashtra, West Bengal, Assam, Himachal Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Bihar, Telangana, Odisha, Haryana and Chhattisgarh, but elections to the seats in the Upper House will be held in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Jharkhand, Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat on March 26.
A total of 55 Rajya Sabha seats in 17 states were up for grabs in this round. The deadline for withdrawal of nominations ended on Wednesday.
In Maharashtra, seven nominees, including Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar, and Union minister of state for social justice Ramdas Athawale of the and Republican Party of India (A), were elected to the Upper House after the nomination of an independent candidate was rejected during the scrutiny process. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the largest party in the state assembly, fielded three candidates, the NCP two, and the Congress and the Shiv Sena one each.
The Trinamool Congress (TMC) in West Bengal saw all its four candidates and a Communist Party of India (Marxist) nominee declared elected unopposed. Arpita Ghosh, Dinesh Trivedi, Subrata Bakshi and Mausam Noor of the TMC and the and CPI(M)’s Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharya, backed by the Congress, were elected after the deadline for withdrawal of nomination papers ended at 3pm, officials said.
After the TMC-backed independent candidate Dinesh Bajaj’s nomination was cancelled due to technical reasons on Tuesday, the voting scheduled for March 26 was no longer required.
Two BJP nominees, Ram Chander Jangra and Dushyant Kumar Gautam, and the Congress’s Deepender Singh Hooda were elected unopposed from Haryana.
In Chhattisgarh, the only candidates in the fray for the two seats of the Upper House, Congress nominees KTS Tulsi and Phulo Devi Netam, were declared elected unopposed.
No election was required in Bihar, where all five candidates were declared unopposed. The secretary of the state assembly and the returning officer for the Rajya Sabha polls, Bateshwar Nath Pandey, declared Amarendra Dhari Singh, Prem Chand Gupta( both Rashtriya Janata Dal), Ramnath Thakur and Harivansh Narayan Singh (both Janata Dal United), and Vivek Thakur (BJP) as elected.
In Odisha, the four Biju Janata Dal candidates -- Kudumi leader Mamata Mahanta, former Odia film actor Munna Khan, trade union leader Subash Singh and technocrat Sujeet Kumar -- were all elected unopposed.
In Tamil Nadu all the six candidates for the biennial elections, including the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam’s M Thambidurai, former Lok Sabha deputy speaker and Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam leader Tiruchi Siva, an incumbent Upper House member, were declared elected, along with the AIADMK’s other candidate, former minister KP Munusamy, and GK Vasan, the chief of the Tamil Maanila Congress (Moopanar).
The main opposition DMK’s NR Elango and P Selvarasu, were elected as well, according to an official release from the legislative assembly secretariat.
