LUCKNOW: The Bharatiya Janata Party has named eight new candidates for the Rajya Sabha from Uttar Pradesh and dropped all eight of its outgoing members from the state, among them Union ministers Hardeep Singh Puri and B.L. Verma.
The party's Central Election Committee approved the names of Dharampal Singh, Radhakant Ojha, Prakash Pal, Vidyasagar Sonkar, Gopi Krishna Pandey, Priyanka Singh Rawat, Ram Pratap Singh Chauhan and Shruti Gangwar, All India Radio reported. October 6 was the last day for filing nominations.
Besides the two ministers, the outgoing members not renominated are Arun Singh, Brijlal, Neeraj Shekhar, Geeta Shakya, Seema Dwivedi and former Deputy Chief Minister Dinesh Sharma, Organiser reported.
The new list spreads the seats across the state's regions and communities, the paper said. Dharampal Singh, from the Lodh community, and Shruti Gangwar, a Kurmi who chairs the Bareilly Urban Co-operative Bank, represent Rohilkhand. Prakash Pal is from the Pal community in the Kanpur-Bundelkhand region. Radhakant Ojha and Gopi Krishna Pandey are Brahmins, Ojha with ties to Purvanchal. Priyanka Singh Rawat, a former Lok Sabha member from Barabanki, and Vidyasagar Sonkar, from Purvanchal, are Dalits. Ram Pratap Singh Chauhan, from western Uttar Pradesh, is a former state general secretary of the party.
Uttar Pradesh has 403 Assembly seats, seven of them vacant, leaving 396 legislators to vote. A candidate needs 37 first-preference votes to win a seat, Organiser reported, and on those numbers the BJP is expected to win eight of the ten seats and the Samajwadi Party two.
The Samajwadi Party has renominated its general secretary, Ram Gopal Yadav, one of the outgoing members, among its candidates, and said its nominees would file their papers in the presence of party president Akhilesh Yadav. The party has the numbers to win two seats with Congress support, Shafaqna reported, as it did in the 2024 Rajya Sabha elections, when it elected two candidates with its Congress allies.
Scrutiny of nominations is on October 7 and the last date for withdrawal is October 9. Polling will be held from 9 am to 4 pm on October 16, with counting the same day.
The Election Commission notified the biennial elections on September 29: ten seats from Uttar Pradesh and one from Uttarakhand, plus a bye-election to one seat from West Bengal. Nominations opened the same day. The terms of the outgoing members end on November 25; besides the BJP members, they include Ramji of the BSP and, from Uttarakhand, Naresh Bansal, All India Radio reported.
On October 4, the BJP named Dinesh Arya for the Uttarakhand seat and Rukmini Mallick, the film star known as Koel Mallick, for the West Bengal seat, All India Radio reported; the party's Central Election Committee approved both names. Mallick, the daughter of veteran actor Ranjit Mallick, is one of Bengal's best-known film stars, according to India TV. Mallick resigned from the Rajya Sabha on July 16, which created the vacancy she is now contesting, India TV reported. When the elections were notified, All India Radio described the vacancy as following the resignation of Trinamool Congress MP Rukmini Mallik.
Rajya Sabha members are elected by state legislators, so the results usually follow party strength in each Assembly. In Uttar Pradesh, the number of candidates left in the field after the October 9 withdrawal deadline will show whether a contest is needed on October 16.
