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Rajya Sabha Polls: Amit Shah, Akhilesh Yadav Make Every MLA ‘Count’

The BJP is taking the Rajya Sabha fight down to the very last vote from the Uttar Pradesh assembly.

(Source: BloombergQuint/PTI)
(Source: BloombergQuint/PTI)

A Rajya Sabha candidate from India’s most populous state needs the support of 37 members of the legislative assembly to be elected outright, or ‘by quota’. The Bharatiya Janata Party has put up nine candidates for the 10 UP seats being contested in this round of Rajya Sabha elections and is taking the fight down to the very last vote from the assembly. Eight of those candidates, including Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, are expected to sail through, with the outright support of 296 (37 MLAs x 8 candidates) of the party’s 311 members of the U.P. legislative assembly. The BJP’s ninth candidate—Anil Agarwal— is in a contest against the Bahujan Samaj Party’s Bhim Rao Ambedkar, named after one of independent India’s founding fathers and the BSP’s ideological icon. To elect Ambedkar, the BSP needs the support of the Samajwadi Party, the Congress, and a few other MLAs.

The Samajwadi Party has 47 MLAs in the assembly, of which 37 are expected to cast their vote to re-elect the party’s candidate and current Member of Parliament Jaya Bachchan. The SP has pledged the support of its 10 ‘surplus votes’ to Ambedkar, who has the backing of 19 BSP MLAs and seven Congress MLAs. That takes his tally, for the moment, to 36, needing one more MLA to win the Rajya Sabha seat outright.

But there are two hurdles to this math for Ambedkar.

The SP is battling the desertion of two MLAs seen aligned to the party, one each, from within and without.

First, the BJP recently inducted former SP leader Naresh Agarwal (no relation to the BJP candidate) into its fold, whose son Nitin Agarwal is still an MLA with the SP. Naresh Agarwal has said that his son will not support the BSP candidate—bringing the SP’s ‘surplus transfer’ to the BSP down to nine and the outright support for Ambedkar down to 35.

Naresh Agrawal on joining the BJP, in New Delhi, on March 12, 2018. (Source: PTI)
Naresh Agrawal on joining the BJP, in New Delhi, on March 12, 2018. (Source: PTI)

Second, the SP (and via it, BSP) may have also been banking on the support of the sole MLA of the Nishad Party. Praveen Nishad, who won the recent Gorakhpur Lok Sabha by-poll on an SP ticket is the son of Sanjay Nishad—the founder of the Nishad Party. But regional and national media reports say that the Nishad Party MLA—Vijay Mishra—has offered his support to the BJP-backed candidate Anil Agarwal.

Rajya Sabha Polls: Amit Shah, Akhilesh Yadav Make Every MLA ‘Count’

Short of an outright, or ‘quota’ win of 37, the Rajya Sabha system of first and second preference votes kicks in. Each elector marks their choice of candidate preference. In the event of no outright winner, the candidate with the least amount of first preference votes is eliminated. To understand who that would be, the numbers from the BJP’s side need to be tallied as well.

While BJP president Amit Shah is trying to stop the BSP candidate from getting the support of 37 MLAs, here’s how the numbers add up for the candidate backed by his own party. The BJP expects Anil Agarwal to get first preference support from:

  • The 15 ‘surplus’ BJP MLAs (311 minus the 296 who elected the first 8 candidates).
  • 9 MLAs of BJP-ally Apna Dal (Sonelal), whose leader Anupriya Patel is a minister in the Modi government.
  • 4 MLAs of the NDA-constituent Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party, whose chief held a meeting with Amit Shah overnight.
  • the SP cross-over vote from Naresh Agarwal’s son Nitin Agarwal, and
  • the Nishad Party MLA Vijay Mishra.
The BSP-SP-Congress tally (excluding Nitin Agarwal and Vijay Mishra) adds up to 35, and the BJP’s (including the two) is at 30.
Rajya Sabha Polls: Amit Shah, Akhilesh Yadav Make Every MLA ‘Count’

The four electors yet to be counted are:

  • One MLA of the Rashtriya Lok Dal, whose chief Ajit Singh was civil aviation minister in the Congress-led UPA government.
  • Independent MLA Raghuraj Pratap Singh, known locally as Raja Bhaiya, who was close to the BJP in the late-1990s, and then the Samajwadi Party from 2003 to 2007.
  • Independent MLA Vinod Kumar Saroj, whose constituency falls within Raja Bhaiya’s extended area of influence in Pratapgarh.
  • Independent MLA Amanmani Tripathi, who has faced a murder investigation over the last year.

To avoid taking the race to the second ballot/preference votes, the BSP-SP-Congress combine needs to swing the support of at least two of these four MLAs, and protect its own flock. The BJP needs seven, which would require breaking the opposition unity. That outcome would offer the party a taste of revenge, after a united SP-BSP left the ruling BJP second-best in Gorakhpur and Phulpur on March 14.