NEW DELHI, Aug 27: The ruling NDA reached majority mark in the Rajya Sabha on Tuesday as nine BJP members and two from allies were elected unopposed in the by-polls to the upper house.
With Tuesday’s nine winners BJP’s strength went up to 96, taking the NDA tally to 112 in the upper house. Among the three others to get elected unopposed were one each from NDA allies NCP faction of Ajit Pawar faction and Rashtriya Lok Manch. The ruling alliance also has the support of six nominated and one independent members. One member of the Congress also got elected, taking the Opposition numbers in the Upper House to 85.
Rajya Sabha has 245 seats, though currently there are eight vacancies — four from Jammu and Kashmir and four nominated. With the house’s current strength of 237, the majority mark is 119.
The BJP candidates elected unopposed included Mission Ranjan Dass and Rameshwar Teli from Assam, Manan Kumar Mishra from Bihar, Kiran Chadhary from Haryana, George Kurien from Madhya Pradesh, Dhirya Sheel Patil from Maharashtra, Mamata Mohanta from Odisha, Ravneet Singh Bittu from Rajasthan and Rajeev Bhattacharjee from Tripura.
Congress’s Abhishek Manu Singhvi was elected unopposed from Telangana. NCP Ajit Pawar faction’s Nitin Patil got elected from Maharashtra and RLM’s Updendra Kushwaha made it to the upper house from Bihar.
A majority mark in the Rajya Sabha for which the NDA has been trying for a decade, is going to make the passage of contentious bills painless. Over the years, the huge Opposition numbers had often held up contentious government bills in the upper house. Some of them could be passed with the help of non-aligned parties like Naveen Patnaik’s Biju Janata Dal and YS Jaganmohan Reddy’s YSR Congress. But now, with both parties losing power in their respective states – one to the BJP and one to its ally Chandrababu Naidu – the BJP-led NDA government can no longer count on their support.
(Manas Dasgupta)