NDA nominee C P Radhakrishnan elected India's 15th Vice President

BJP-led NDA candidate C P Radhakrishnan won the vice presidential election with 452 votes against Opposition nominee B Sudershan Reddy's 300, succeeding Jagdeep Dhankhar

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) nominee C P Radhakrishnan won the vice presidential election, the polling and counting for which took place on Tuesday.

 

Radhakrishnan received 452 votes against Opposition nominee B Sudershan Reddy’s 300. He will be the country’s 15th Vice President (VP) after he takes the oath of office.

 

Of the 781 Members of Parliament (MPs), 767 cast their votes in the vice presidential polls. Of these, 752 were valid and 15 were invalid, said P C Mody, secretary general of the Rajya Sabha and returning officer for the polls.

 

The electoral college for the vice presidential election comprises 788 members — 245 from the Rajya Sabha and 543 from the Lok Sabha. The 12 nominated members of the Rajya Sabha are also eligible to vote in the election.

 

 

The present strength of the electoral college is 781 as six seats are vacant in the Rajya Sabha and one in the Lok Sabha.

 

Radhakrishnan (67) hails from Tamil Nadu, and is the third leader from the state to be elected to the post of India’s Vice President (after Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and R Venkataraman, India’s first and seventh Vice Presidents, respectively). Radhakrishnan succeeds Jagdeep Dhankhar, who resigned as Vice President on July 21.

 

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was the first to cast his vote when the polling began at 10 in the morning, congratulated Radhakrishnan after his win. 

 

“His life has always been devoted to serving society and empowering the poor and marginalised. I am confident that he will be an outstanding VP, who will strengthen our constitutional values and enhance parliamentary discourse,” Modi posted on X.

 

In his congratulatory message, Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge said that he hopes that the VP-elect “will uphold the highest ethos of parliamentary traditions, ensuring equal space and dignity for the Opposition, and not succumb to pressures of the ruling dispensation”. Kharge said the VP’s office must be “revitalised to reflect independence, fairness, and strength in safeguarding democratic values”. 

 

The Congress president also flagged the resignation of Dhankhar, terming it “an exit still unexplained and unceremonious”. Dhankhar also issued a congratulatory message for the VP-elect.

 

Reddy, the Opposition's candidate, said he humbly accepts the defeat and asserted that democracy is strengthened not by victory alone, but by the spirit of dialogue, dissent, and participation. He said that though the result was not in his favour, the larger cause “we have collectively sought to advance, remains undiminished”. “The ideological battle continues with ever greater vigour,” Reddy said.

 

Amid speculation that some of the Opposition members broke ranks to vote in favour of the NDA’s nominee, Congress General Secretary In-Charge of Communication Jairam Ramesh said that the Opposition stood united for the vice presidential election.

 

"Its performance has undeniably been most respectable. Its joint candidate Justice (Retd) B Sudershan Reddy secured 40 per cent of the votes. 

 

In 2022, the Opposition had received 26 per cent of the votes in the vice presidential elections," Ramesh said. "The BJP's arithmetical victory is really both a moral and political defeat. The ideological battle continues undiminished," he said.

 

A two-term member of the Lok Sabha from Coimbatore during the tenure of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Radhakrishnan came close to becoming a Union minister, but had to lose out to fellow Tamilian Pon Radhakrishnan in 1998 after some confusion over his name by the then floor managers of the BJP.

 

Radhakrishnan joined the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) as a teenager and rose through the ranks in the organisation and later in the BJP. He hails from the OBC Kongu Vellalar Gounder community.

 

Before his current stint as the Maharashtra governor, Radhakrishnan has also served as the governor of Jharkhand, Telangana, and Puducherry.

 

Born on October 20, 1957, at Tiruppur in Tamil Nadu, Radhakrishnan has a Bachelor's degree in Business Administration. He was appointed as the secretary of the BJP's Tamil Nadu unit in 1996. Between 2004 and 2007, Radhakrishnan served as the Tamil Nadu BJP president. In this role, he undertook a 19,000 km “Rath Yatra” that lasted for 93 days.