Chandigarh: Fearing horse trading in the March 16 Rajya Sabha election for two seats in Haryana, the state Congress on Friday shifted its MLAs to Shimla in neighbouring Congress-ruled Himachal Pradesh. In the House of 90, the ruling BJP has 48 MLAs and three Independent MLAs backing it, the principal opposition party Congress has 37 MLAs and another opposition party Indian National Lok Dal (INLD) has two MLAs.While one needs 31 votes to win a seat, making the election more interesting, a BJP leader Satish Nandal has also jumped into the fray as an independent candidate.While BJP has fielded Sanjay Bhatia, the Congress’ nominee is Karamveer Singh Boudh.
Bhatia had won the Karnal Lok Sabha seat in 2019 by a record-breaking margin of over 6.56 lakh votes. Boudh is a retired government employee and Congress’ national scheduled caste wing coordinator.
The two Rajya Sabha seats fall vacant on April 9 with the expiration of the terms of BJP Rajya Sabha members Kiran Choudhary and Ram Chander Jangra.According to information, while most of the MLAs were moved to Shimla in luxury buses, there were a few who stayed back saying they would join them soon. The legislators would also be given training to vote for the party candidate without making any error. Also Watch:
CONG CAUTIOUS THIS TIMEIt may be recalled that the Congress had to face major embarrassment in the past two RS polls when its nominees lost despite having the numbers.In 2022, Congress candidate Ajay Maken lost from Haryana and Kiran Choudhary and Kuldeep Bishnoi who were in Congress then, had accused each other for `invalid’ vote.Earlier, in 2016 too, the invalidation of as many as 12 votes had led to the embarrassing defeat of R K Anand, who was backed by Congress and INLD and had numbers.