Voting was held for 27 Rajya Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Jharkhand, Rajasthan and Haryana on Saturday.
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The BJP made a clean sweep in Rajasthan where all its four candidates, including Union Urban Development Minister M. Venkaiah Naidu and senior leader Om Prakash Mathur, were elected.
“As per rules no minister or official can misuse the polling centre but in today’s election two Ministers DK Shivakumar (Power) and A Manju (Animal Husbandry) have repeatedly visited the polling centre between 11 AM and 3 PM and pressurised MLAs to vote for the candidate they suggested”, the letter charged.
In the Rajya Sabha elections yesterday, Congress-backed independent candidate R K Anand lost while BJP-backed Subhash Chandra was declared victor.
The result has come as a shock for the Congress, pointing as it did to possible discontent within the state unit of the party over the central leadership’s decision to join hands with the INLD.
There will be a contest between the BJP’s nominee Mahesh Poddar and Congress-backed Jharkhand Mukti Morcha candidate, Basant Soren, who is short of six votes to win the second seat. In Madhya Pradesh, BJP’s MJ Akbar and Anil Madhav Dave won the contest.
In the 403-member Assembly, SP has 229 MLAs, BSP 80, BJP 41, Congress 29 and RLD 8. “Congress votes were found to be invalid”. “As Congress’ designated election agent in the booth, I had seen that our 12 MLAs (whose votes were declared invalid) had clearly voted for RK Anand”. While the other party leader Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi was elected from Jharkhand.
In Haryana, while BJP leader Birender Singh was assured of a comfortable win for one seat, the main centre of interest was the fight was between Chandra and Anand for the other seat.
Congress has claimed there was no “internal sabotage” that caused the defeat.
With 122 members Congress easily pushed through two candidates and its risk with Ramamurthy paid off.
Samajwadi Party won seven seats in the state.
The empowered committee is likely to discuss issues such as the proposed additional one per cent tax on inter-state sales, which is opposed by the Congress party.
The BJP-backed independent candidate sailed through as the votes of Congress’s Bhupinder Hooda and company were invalidated for not using the Election Commission-assigned pen and other capers.
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But Gotia’s future looks bleak as even if the 48 surplus votes of BJP goes to Gotia, he won’t scrape through given he needs 10 more ballots to reach the magic number. Subash Chandra of Zee had filled nomination as an independent but with obvious support from BJP.
