Voting for 10 Rajya Sabha seats in UP begins

Voting in the crucial biennial elections for the 10 Rajya Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh began here today.

To secure a seat to the Upper House of Parliament from this state, a candidate needs 37 first preference votes.

Since the BJP and its allies have 324 seats in the Uttar Pradesh Assembly right now, the saffron party can easily bag eight of the 10 seats and will still be left with 28 surplus votes as the the four-MLA strong Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party (SBSP) has decided to go with the ruling party.

"There can be some contest on the ninth seat," a senior UP BJP leader said.

The Samajwadi Party, which has fielded Jaya Bachchan, and the BSP, which nominated Bhimrao Ambedkar, appeared confident of winning one each of the remaining two seats.

Voting will be held till 4 pm and counting will be taken up an hour later.

BJP candidates in the fray from Uttar Pradesh are Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, Ashok Bajpai, Vijay Pal Singh Tomar, Sakal Deep Rajbhar, Kanta Kardam, Anil Jain, Harnath Singh Yadav, G V L Narasimha Rao and Anil Kumar Agarwal.

The Apna Dal (Sonelal), with nine MLAs, has also decided to vote for the BJP nominees.

"We are standing with the BJP. We held a meeting of our MLAs and it was decided that we will strongly support the BJP," national president of Apna Dal (S) Ashish Patel had told PTI.

The declaration of support from the Apna Dal (S) came days after SBSP chief Om Prakash Rajbhar, a Cabinet minister in state government, declared his party's support for the BJP candidates.

The country's most populous state sends 31 MPs to the 245-member Rajya Sabha, and the BJP, which won a massive victory in the 2017 Assembly elections, is yet to get a lion's share of these.