A day before the June 10 Rajya Sabha elections, both the Congress and the BJP kept a watch on their legislators in Rajasthan and Haryana that are expected to witness close contests. The legislators underwent last-minute training sessions and mock tests, and party leaders held meetings to fine-tune their strategy. The Haryana Congress legislators flew from Raipur, where they had been sequestered, to Delhi while their colleagues in Rajasthan took an aircraft from Udaipur to Jaipur.
Here is a look at the poll mathematics in the two states and what went down on the last day before the elections.
Haryana
In Haryana, two seats are at stake and there are three candidates. The BJP’s Krishan Panwar — former transport minister and five-time MLA — requires 31 votes to win. But for the second seat, 30 votes are needed for a candidate to win. Congress candidate Ajay Maken, a former Union minister, and former Union minister Venod Sharma’s media-baron son Kartikeya Sharma, who is in the fray as an Independent candidate with the support of 10 MLAs of BJP ally Jannayak Janta Party (JJP), are vying for the second seat.
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The BJP’s strength in the 90-member state Assembly is 40 while the JJP has 10 MLAs. The Congress has 31 MLAs while there are seven Independents and one MLA each from the Indian National Lok Dal and the Haryana Lokhit Party. Polling will be held at Haryana Vidhan Sabha from 9 am till 4 pm.
BJP: Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar, Deputy Chief Minister Dushyant Chautala of the JJP, and state BJP president Om Prakash Dhankar met BJP and JJP MLAs at Oberoi-Sukhvilas resort on the outskirts of Chandigarh where the ruling coalition’s MLAs and a few Independent legislators have been staying since Wednesday. Union ministers Gajendra Shekhawat and Vinod Tawre were also expected to meet the MLAs late evening.
Sources in the BJP told The Indian Express that to avoid last-minute snags, all the MLAs, especially the 17 first-time legislators, underwent mock tests on filling ballot papers. “Some of the MLAs who will be casting their precious votes for the first time in a Rajya Sabha election need to be trained and briefed on the ‘Dos and Don’ts’. This time, the stakes are extremely high for all three political parties — the BJP, the JJP, and the Congress. No party can afford to commit a ‘mistake’ in casting the vote,” said a BJP leader.
Congress: The Opposition party’s MLAs have been sequestered at a resort in Raipur, Chhattisgarh, for almost a week. They were brought to New Delhi on Thursday evening on a chartered flight and are likely to be kept at a Rajasthan government guest house in Chanakyapuri.
CLP leader and former chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda, Maken, and the party’s poll observers Bhupesh Baghel, Rajeev Shukla, and Uday Bhan (the state Congress chief) were expected to reach Chandigarh on Thursday evening. The Congress MLA from Adampur, Kuldeep Bishnoi, who has been unhappy with the party since not being given a place in the recent state leadership revamp, also reached Chandigarh on Thursday evening and met a few Independent MLAs.
Sources in the Congress said Bishnoi had “softened” his stance in the last two days. “Ajay Maken got in touch with him. The party is hopeful that he will cast his vote in favour of the party’s nominee,” said one of the MLAs who met Bishnoi.
Several legislators, however, expressed fear that there could be last-minute technical glitches or abstentions that might spoil the Congress’s chances. “BJP would not have backed the Independent candidate if they were not sure of his victory. They must have something up their sleeves,” said a senior MLA.
Rajasthan
There are four Upper House seats up for grabs from the state while the number of candidates is five. Candidates will need 41 votes to win. The Congress, with 108 MLAs in the House, has nominated three candidates — Randeep Singh Surjewala, Mukul Wasnik, and Pramod Tiwari. The BJP. which has 71 legislators, has fielded only former MLA Ghanshyam Tiwari and is backing Independent candidate and media baron Subhash Chandra.
The Congress needs 15 more votes for all three of its candidates to sail through while the BJP needs 11 surplus votes for the candidates it is backing.
Congress: On Thursday afternoon, the Congress took its MLAs and other legislators supporting it from the resort in Udaipur where they had been sequestered this week to the airport and flew most of them to Jaipur on a special aircraft. Some others took a smaller chartered aircraft to the capital.
In the capital, they were sequestered in a hotel on the city outskirts of Kookas. There, they were scheduled to undergo a final training session in the evening.
BJP: The Opposition party’s legislators were already staying in a Jaipur resort and will head to the state Assembly to cast their votes on Friday morning. Like the past two days, BJP MLAs underwent a training session on voting from 6 pm and 7 pm. Earlier in the day, they attended sessions on “political personalities blessed with life values”, “Congress’s anti-people policies and people’s campaign”, and the “BJP’s contribution in reconstructing India”, among others.