Other States - Madhya Pradesh   

BJP bags Rajya Sabha seats from M.P.

BHOPAL: All three Bharatiya Janata Party candidates in the race for the Rajya Sabha from Madhya Pradesh—Prabhat Jha, Maya Singh and Raghunandan Sharma - were declared elected at the end of polling on Friday.

The fourth candidate, Vivek Tankha, who contested as an independent with the support of the Congress and the Samajwadi Party, lost.

He secured 51 first preference votes against 58 polled by each of the three BJP candidates.

The BJP, which has 166 MLAs in the State Assembly, got eight additional first preference votes from non-BJP members to ensure the victory of its three candidates. It got open support from MLAs belonging to the Gondwana Gantantra Party, Rashtriya Samanta Dal and Janata Dal (U)

All the 41 Congress MLAs voted for Mr. Tankha. Besides, he got seven of the eight Samajwadi Party votes, one each from the CPI (M) and the Nationalist Congress Party. The Samajwadi Party’s Vijay Bahadur Singh Bundela defied the party whip and voted for the BJP.

Samajwadi Party MLA Kishore Samrite, who had earlier claimed that he had been bribed to vote for Mr. Tankha, finally ended up voting for him.

After casting his vote, he said he had only obeyed the party whip and the party president Mulayam Singh’s command. He said he was still sticking to his “bribe” charge and emphasised that he was sticking to the FIR he had filed in this regard.

There was a large presence of BJP and Congress leaders in the Assembly premises while the MLAs exercised their right to vote on Friday. State BJP president Narendra Singh Tomar was holding fort near the entrance along with senior party leader Kailash Joshi as many State Ministers were seen escorting the MLAs to cast their vote.

In the Congress camp, Opposition leader Jamuna Devi along with senior party leaders Digvijay Singh and Ajay Singh was mobilising the party MLAs. PCC president Suresh Pachouri was also present along with Mr. Tankha. All the sitting MLAs except the two Bahujan Samaj Party MLAs voted in the election.

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