Chief Minister Mayawati and her cabinet colleague Swami Prasad Maurya were on Thursday declared elected unopposed as the members of Vidhan Parishad.
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Principal secretary of Vidhan Sabha Rajendra Prasad Pandey declared them elected as the MLC after the time for withdrawal of nomination papers was over. The death of Samajwadi Party member Vikramaditya Pandey and the BSP Barkhu Ram Verma had caused by-election to two seats.
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While the term of Mayawati's Vidhan Parishad seat expires on July 6, 2010, Maurya will remain member of the Upper House till January 30, 2009. A Rajya Sabha MP Mayawati has opted for the Upper House instead of contesting election to the Vidhan Sabha on the grounds that she wanted to give equal treatment to all the 403 assembly constituencies.
“Unlike Mulayam Singh Yadav who develops only his constituency, I will equally treat all the 403 Vidhan Sabha seats,” said Mayawati soon after filing her nomination papers. Maurya, on the other hand, had lost the Vidhan Sabha election. Chief minister, however, decided to induct him in ministry and provided him the back door entry to the state legislature.
Umesh Raghuvanshi is an award-winning journalist with nearly four decades of demonstrated experience in the profession. He is the author of Ayodhya: The Gods Are Liberated. He is skilled in storytelling and newswriting, and writes on politics, governance, legislature, finance, environment, and social issues. He is based in Lucknow, is well-travelled, and has covered several national and international events, as well as all assembly and parliament elections in Uttar Pradesh since 1984. He has been a visiting scholar at the Graduate School of Journalism, University of California, Berkeley, USA, and a Metcalf Fellow at the Metcalf Institute of Marine and Environmental Reporting, University of Rhode Island, USA. He is a science graduate from DBS College, Dehradun, and holds an MA in Political Science from DAV (PG) College, Dehradun. He won the KC Kulish International Merit Award for excellence in journalism (2015) and received it in New Delhi in 2017. He also won a competition organised by the United Nations Environment Programme DTIE OzonAction Programme in 2009 that assessed coverage of the interlinkages between ozone and climate change. He was awarded in Beijing, China, in 2010. He started his career with a Dehradun-based English daily in the early 1980s and later worked with The Pioneer too.
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