The recent Rajya Sabha elections in Haryana have turned out to be a new trouble for the party.
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To checkmate BJP, which is sure of sending Union Minister Birender Singh to the Upper House, the Congress Friday extended support the support of 17 MLAs to Anand, who also has the backing of INLD’s 19 and Akali Dal’s lone MLA.
This likelihood emerged after the party asked former chief minister Hooda to explain how his vote and that of 12 other MLAs supporting him could all have been disqualified for being “inked” wrong.
BJP backed-Independent candidate and media baron Subhash Chandra won in a contest marred by cross-voting with 14 votes of Congress being rejected.
All the four BJP candidates, including union urban development minister M. Venkaiah Naidu and senior BJP leader Om Prakash Mathur, won the elections for the four Rajya Sabha seats from Rajasthan. But this does not seem to be a credible enough defence.
Saturday saw the Assemblies of nine states – Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Rajasthan and Haryana – vote their choices to the Rajya Sabha.
Chandra, an independent candidate supported by the BJP, scraped through amid political drama during the vote count.
He defeated another independent candidate, Delhi-based lawyer R.K. Anand, who was supported by the INLD and the Congress.
Notably, according to rules, during poll proceedings, voters should use only the pen provided by the Returning Officer to record their votes in the voting compartments. Congress is expected to move to the Court seeking re-election for Rajya Sabha from Haryana. So, they would feel about the AIADMK win in 4 seats. Allegations of bribing JD(S) and Independent MLAs have marred the polls in Karnataka but the Election Commission has rejected demands for cancelling them. “We will fight it politically and legally”.
Anand was also elected as a member of Parliament to the Rajya Sabha from Jharkhand in March 2000, during the NDA government.
The embarrassing revolt by so many senior Congress MLAs have not gone down well with the party supporters.
Though the victory of Tamta, a prominent Dalit leader from Kumaun region, was a foregone conclusion with the numbers heavily stacked in favour of the ruling combine, initial opposition to his candidature from within the party s state unit and the alliance had given rise to the possibility of last minute cross voting.
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Therefore, in case of rejection of 14 votes, Singh needed 26 votes for his win and his 14 votes as second preference were transferred to Chandra, taking his total number of votes to 29, Sharma said.
