© The Indian Express (P) Ltd
Tags:
Journalism of Courage
The Congress party on Friday successfully elected all three of its candidates to the Rajya Sabha from Rajasthan – Randeep Singh Surjewala, Mukul Wasnik and Pramod Tiwari – while staving off a competition from BJP backed media baron Subhash Chandra, who contested as an independent. BJP veteran Ghanshyam Tiwari was also elected to the Upper House from Rajasthan.
While Chandra had claimed he will sail through with the help of cross voting, it was BJP MLA from Dholpur, Shobharani Kushwah, who cross voted in favour of Congress candidate Pramod Tiwari, sending shockwaves in the state BJP.
Reacting to the cross voting, Leader of Opposition Gulab Chand Kataria said that, “There will be action. A notice will reach her for violating the whip. No one can deny that the whip has been violated since it is on authorised documents.”
Later in the day, Kataria suspended her from the party’s primary membership and issued a notice to her seeking a response within seven days, asking why she shouldn’t be expelled from the party for indiscipline. Kataria said that if she doesn’t respond within seven days, the party will be free to take action against her.
The Congress cornered a total of 126 votes, which was along expected lines: R S Surjewala polled 43 votes, Mukul Wasnik polled 42 votes and Tiwari polled 41 votes, as per Returning Officer Dr Joga Ram.
As many as 41 votes were needed to elect one RS member. Going into the polls, the Congress had the support of 126 MLAs, including 108 of its own, as well as 13 independents, two each of Bhartiya Tribal Party (BTP) and Communist Party of India – Marxist (CPM) and one Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) MLA; that translated into three extra votes.
However on Friday, one Congress vote was rejected while it received an additional vote of BJP’s Kushwah.
In contrast, BJP has 71 of its MLAs and was supported by three RLP MLAs, who said they voted for Subhash Chandra. Tiwari and Chandra together had 74 votes and on paper, Chandra was still short of eight votes.
BJP’s Ghanshyam Tiwari received 43 votes. Of the remaining 31, one vote of the BJP, that of Kushwah, went to Pramod Tiwari, leaving Chandra with just 30 votes, 11 short of winning.
The polls were necessitated due to the upcoming retirement of BJP’s RS members K J Alphons, Harshvardhan Singh Dungarpur, Om Prakash Mathur and Ramkumar Verma on July 4.
With the wins, Congress will improve its RS tally from Rajasthan. Going into the polls, BJP had seven RS members from Rajasthan while Congress had three. Post the wins, Congress will have more RS members than BJP; Congress will have six RS members – up from 3 – while BJP’s tally will go down from 7 to 4.
Facing a threat from Chandra, Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot pulled out all the stops. The Congress party had started herding its MLAs together on June 1 as part of ‘action taken report’ following last month’s Nav Sankalp Shivir. Post the completion of two day meet, the MLAs were shifted to Udaipur beginning June 2. In contrast, BJP MLAs were shifted only on June 6. On Friday, Gehlot himself was a polling agent.
Once the Congress MLAs returned to Jaipur on Thursday, they were taken to a resort in Jaipur’s Amer tehsil. And perhaps to prevent any communication between the legislators and Chandra, internet services were suspended in Amer tehsil for 17 hours till Friday noon – an unprecedented move in RS polls in the state.
Newsletter | Click to get the day’s best explainers in your inbox
Thanking all the party and supporting MLAs for voting for Congress candidates, Gehlot also extended “special thanks” to BJP’s Kushwah, saying that “they (BJP) have started a tradition of horse trading which she didn’t like; I think that’s why she probably voted for us.”
“The maths was clear; Congress had independents, BTP, CPM and Subhash Garg (of RLD). When everyone knows that as per calculation, 126 people are with us, then I would like to ask why did BJP field a candidate when they did not even have the numbers? It means that they wanted to indulge in horse trading but they couldn’t and failed spectacularly,” Gehlot said.
He said that he believed that the three newly elected RS candidates will raise the issues of the state with the Centre, including the “big issue” of Eastern Rajasthan Canal Project (ERCP).
After winning the RS polls, Pramod Tiwari said, “We used to hear that Ashok Gehlot is a magician, and today he worked his magic…The biggest message from these elections is that Rajasthan has answered that it won’t bend and can’t be sold.” With BJP’s Shobharani voting for him, he said he doesn’t know who Shobharani is and why she voted for him.
Earlier in the day, Chandra had said, “I would like to thank all those who probably voted for me, including independents and others, as well as those who wanted for me but could not, I would express my gratitude to all of them.” Asked about cross voting, he said, “When I can expect others to cross vote for me then it is not surprising if a BJP (MLA) also does that.”
He said that due to his candidature, “works of several MLAs were done”, since the ruling party was under pressure. “Some people called me up at night and in the morning, and apologised saying that they weren’t able to support me this time around,” Chandra said.
