Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu, Power Minister Piyush Goyal and senior Congress leader P Chidambaram were today elected unopposed to the Rajya Sabha. Bharatiya Janata Party’s Goyal and Chidambaram of the Congress were elected from Maharashtra, along with four others. These were Praful Patel of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), Vinay Sahasrabuddhe and Vikas Mahatme of the BJP and Shiv Sena’s Sanjay Raut.
All four who had filed nominations for as many vacancies in Andhra Pradesh were also elected to the Rajya Sabha. These included Railway Minister and BJP leader Suresh Prabhu, Telugu Desam Party (TDP) leader and Union Minister of State for Science and Technology Y Satyanarayana Chowdary. Two other candidates TDP’s TG Venkatesh and V Vijaysai Reddy of the YSR Congress were also elected unopposed. Prabhu was elected with support from BJP ally TDP.
Candidates in Bihar and Tamil Nadu were also elected unopposed. In Tamil Nadu, All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) candidates R Vaithilingam, A Navaneethakrishnan, A Vijayakumar, former Union Minister S R Balasubramoniyan, DMK nominees R S Bharathi and T K S Elangovan were declared elected to fill the vacancies of the six members from the state.
With the election of four MPs, the strength of AIADMK will go up to 12 from the present 11 in Rajya Sabha, while DMK’s will remain four.
Five candidates declared elected from Bihar are Janata Dal (United)’s Sharad Yadav and RP Singh, Rashtriya Janata Dal’s Misa Bharti and Supreme Court lawyer Ram Jethmalani and BJP’s Gopal Narayan Singh. Bharti is the daughter of RJD chief Lalu Prasad while Jethmalani is his lawyer in the fodder scam. The RJD, prior to this, had no members in the Rajya Sabha, while JD (U) now has 9.
In Punjab, Congress leader Ambika Soni and Shiromani Akali Dal’s Balw0+inder Singh Bhunder were declared elected to the two Rajya Sabha seats from the state falling vacant on July 4, with the end of terms of both Bhunder and Soni.
Voting will be held for rest of the seats from across nearly a dozen states on June 11. There are likely to be keen contests for one of the 11 seats of Uttar Pradesh, one of the two seats of Haryana and one seat of Jharkhand.
