New Delhi: 10 Rajya Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh and 1 in Uttarakhand will soon fall vacant. Similarly, one seat in West Bengal is vacant. Elections for these 12 seats will be held on October 16.
Among the retiring members are Union Minister Hardeep Singh Puri, Arun Singh, Neeraj Shekhar, Brijlal, Union Minister of State B.L. Verma, BJP leaders Seema Dwivedi, Samajwadi Party’s Ram Gopal Yadav, and a member of the Bahujan Samaj Party. Of the 10 vacant seats in Uttar Pradesh, eight are held by the BJP.
The list of 8 candidates approved by the party’s central election committee was released by the party’s national headquarters in-charge, Tarun Chugh. It includes Dharampal Singh, Radhakant Ojha, Prakash Pal, Vidyasagar Sonkar, Gopi Krishna Pandey, and Ram Pratap Singh Chauhan. It also includes two women, Priyanka Singh Rawat and Shruti Gangwar.
Dharampal Singh, Prakash Pal, and Shruti Gangwar belong to the OBC category. Vidyasagar Sonkar and Priyanka Singh Rawat belong to the Scheduled Caste category. This is being seen as a social calculation with the 2027 Assembly election in mind. Soon after the list was released, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath congratulated the candidates.
The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance has 150 seats in the Rajya Sabha. The Uttar Pradesh Legislative Assembly currently has 396 members. A candidate needs 37 first-preference votes to win. Accordingly, the Samajwadi Party is assured of two seats. It is estimated that the BJP alliance will get seven or eight of the remaining seats. It is said that the contest for the eighth seat will be intense.
