LUCK: The Rajya sabha The elections took an interesting turn on Tuesday when Samajwadi Party support extended to a independent candidate, Prakash Bajaj, who submitted his nomination just before the deadline. Now, there are 11 candidates in the fray for 10 vacant seats, requiring a vote for the last seat that was being watched by Mayawati. Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) despite not having proper numbers. Voting will take place on November 9.
The nomination papers from Bajaj, a Varanasi-based lawyer, were submitted with the support of 10 SP lawmakers. The SP made a last-minute decision after securing a seat for party leader and national secretary general Ram Gopal Yadav, who is the party’s official candidate. While Prakash Bajaj is a corporate lawyer, his father Pradeep Bajaj was associated with the Janata Party.
To be elected, all candidates must obtain at least 37 votes. Thus, the SP, which has a strength of 48 MLA in the UP assembly, had 11 additional votes to spare. One of his MLAs, Nitin Agarwal, though has supported the BJP after his father Naresh Agarwal joined the saffron brigade in 2018, after he was denied an RS ticket.
The BJP, on the other hand, did not present an additional candidate despite having eight votes to spare; With a force of 304 MLA in the UP assembly, the BJP would have required the support of 296 MLA to get its eight candidates to advance. With nine MLAs from your ally Apna dal (Sone Lal), the BJP would have gathered 17 additional votes. On top of this, MLAs like Rakesh Singh and Aditi Singh from Congress, Anil Singh and Ram Veer Upadhayay from BSP have been rubbing shoulders with the BJP for quite some time. In fact, Upadhyay’s son Chirag Upadhyay joined BJP only earlier this month.
BJP sources said that running or supporting an 11th candidate was not in their plan. “We had enough numbers for eight candidates only,” said a senior BJP leader associated with the party’s electoral team. He categorically put aside rumors that a family member of the former trade union minister and congressman, Akhilesh Das, had been introduced. Despite speculation about Das Alka’s wife, he began to buy papers to present his nomination.
Political analysts said that after the BJP decided not to run an additional candidate, it became clear that there would be no vote and all 10 candidates, including BSP’s Ramji Gautam, would have sailed with just 18 MLAs. However, that would have allowed the BJP and BSP to get closer, analysts said.
Now, with SP blocking the smooth sailing of the BSP candidate, the gulf between the two arch-rivals, which came closer in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, appears to widen in the run-up to the next big fight in 2022.
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