Polls to 56 Rajya Sabha Seats in Feb end
Asia News Agency
The Election Commission Monday announced that elections to 56 Rajya Sabha seats from 15 states, which are falling vacant in April, will be held on February 27. While 50 members retire on April 2, six will retire the following day. Of the 238 members of the Upper House at present, 109 are from NDA parties while 89 belong to parties in the INDIA alliance.
Manoj C G (Chief of National Bureau, Politics, IndianExpress) and Damini Nath, Assistant Editor, national bureau of The Indian Express) note “the BJP’s decisive Assembly election victories in three Hindi heartland states in December and the change in political equations in Bihar notwithstanding, the composition of the Rajya Sabha, where the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA) is still short of the halfway mark, may not change significantly after the biennial elections next month.”
Winners and losers
Of the 56 MPs who are retiring, 28 are from the BJP and 10 are from the Congress. The BJP is likely to retain almost the same number of seats while the Congress will win nine seats and can hope to get one more with the help of its allies in Bihar. The Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) will be the biggest loser. Three of its MPs are retiring and the Congress which ousted the BRS from power in Telangana last month is set to pick up two of the seats.
Uttar Pradesh will have the highest number of vacancies with 10 seats, followed by Maharashtra and Bihar (six each), Madhya Pradesh and West Bengal (five each), Karnataka and Gujarat (four each), Odisha, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, and Rajasthan (three), and Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana, and Chattisgarh (one each).
