All five Rajya Sabha candidates in West Bengal elected unopposed

Four Trinamool Congress candidates and a CPI(M) nominee for the five Rajya Sabha seats in West Bengal were declared elected unopposed on Wednesday, officials said.

Trinamool Congress candidates Arpita Ghosh, Dinesh Trivedi, Subrata Bakshi and Mausam Noor for the first four seats, and CPI(M)'s Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharya, backed by the Congress, for the fifth seat were declared elected after the deadline for withdrawal of nomination papers at 3 pm, they said.

After TMC-backed Independent candidate Dinesh Bajaj's nomination was cancelled due to technical reasons on Tuesday, voting scheduled on March 26 was done away with.

Five Rajya Sabha seats from in West Bengal were falling vacant next month.

"This is for the first time that I will be going to Rajya Sabha. Earlier, I was a member of Parliament from Lok Sabha. I will fight for the rights of the poor people of the country," Noor said.

Bhattacharya said he would continue to fight for protecting democracy and secularism in the country.

Though the current strength of parties in the state assembly entails 49 first preference votes for a candidate to win, the absence of a sixth person in the fray ensured thatall those in the electoral arena emerge victorious.

According to TMC sources, the party had fielded Bajaj as an Independent candidate to scuttle the chances of arch-rival CPI(M) winning a seat and to thwart the BJP, which has only seven MLAs, from fielding a candidate.

The 294-member House at present has 207 MLAs, who had won the 2016 polls on TMC tickets. More than 24 MLAs of the Congress and the CPI(M) later switched over to the TMC and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Also, around 10 MLAs of the TMC are either not in touch with the party or have crossed over to the BJP, according to party sources. None of them has, however, been disqualified under the anti-defection law.

While Noor lost from the Malda North seat in last year's Lok Sabha polls, Ghosh had unsuccessfully contested from Balurghat and Dinesh Trivedi, a former railway minister, has lost from Barrackpore. Bakshi did not contest from Kolkata South, the seat he had won in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls.

Bhattacharya, a former Kolkata mayor, had unsuccessfully contested the Lok Sabha elections in 2019 from the Jadavpur seat, which the TMC won.

The fifth seat is being currently held by Ritabrata Bandopadhyay, who was elected as a CPI(M) nominee in 2014, but was expelled from the party in 2017. His tenure ends in April.

Since his expulsion and post-2019 Lok Sabha polls, the CPI(M)'s West Bengal unit did not have any representation in either Lok Sabha or Rajya Sabha. This has happened for the first time since the party's inception in 1964.

With Bhattacharya's getting elected to Rajya Sabha, the state CPI(M) unit now has a representative in Parliament.

Earlier the CPI(M) West Bengal unit had proposed the name of its party chief Sitaram Yechury for the fifth seat from Bengal, to the CPI(M) politburo. But the proposal was turned down by the party's highest decision-making body citing party rules that no member would be nominated three times in a row for the Upper House.