Chidambaram, Goyal and Prabhu elected to Rajya Sabha

Deadline for withdrawal of nominations for biennial polls to 58 seats of Rajya Sabha ended today afternoon

Railways minister Suresh Prabhu, power minister Piyush Goyal and Congress leader P Chidambaram were on Friday elected unopposed to the Rajya Sabha.

Goyal (Bharatiya Janata Party) and Chidambaram were elected from Maharashtra, along with four others. These were Praful Patel of the Nationalist Congress Party, Vinay Sahasrabuddhe and Vikas Mahatme of the BJP and Shiv Sena’s Sanjay Raut.

The deadline for withdrawal of nominations for the biennial polls to 58 seats of the Rajya Sabha ended on Friday afternoon. As none of the six candidates for as many Rajya Sabha vacancies from Maharashtra pulled out, all were elected to the Upper House.

Similarly, all four who had filed nominations for that many vacancies in Andhra Pradesh were also elected to the Rajya Sabha.

These included Prabhu and Telugu Desam Party (TDP) leader and Union minister of state for science and technology Y Satyanarayana Chowdary. Two other candidates - TDP’s T G Venkatesh and V Vijaysai Reddy of YSR Congress were also elected unopposed. Prabhu was elected with the support from the BJP ally TDP.

Candidates in Bihar and Tamil Nadu were also elected unopposed. In Tamil Nadu, All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam candidates R Vaithilingam, A Navaneethakrishnan, A Vijayakumar, former Union Minister S R Balasubramoniyan, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam 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 the Rajya Sabha, while that of DMK’s will remain four.

Five candidates declared elected from Bihar are Janata Dal (United)’s Sharad Yadav and R P 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 nine.

In Punjab, Congress leader Ambika Soni and Shiromani Akali Dal's Balwinder Singh Bhunder were declared elected to the two Rajya Sabha seats from the state falling vacant on July 4, with the end of the terms of both Bhunder and Soni.

Voting will be held for the 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.