Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, Aug 6: The former West Bengal governor and the BJP-led NDA candidate Jagdeep Dhankhar was on Saturday elected the 14th Vice-President of India defeating the Congress veteran joint opposition candidate Margaret Alva by a comfortable margin.
He will succeed M Venkaiah Naidu whose term ends on August 10.
Announcing the results at the end of the counting of votes, the Secretary-General of the Lok Sabha, who was the returning officer for the elections, said Dhankhar received 528 first preference votes against Ms Alva’s 182 votes. Later while congratulating Dhankhar for his electoral victory, Alva regretted that some opposition parties voted for the BJP candidate while the Trinamool Congress, the ruling party in West Bengal, abstained from voting.
The returning officer said of the total 780 electors, 725 cast their ballots with 55 MPs not exercising their franchise. Of the total votes polled, 15 votes were found to be invalid. The turnout was 92.94 per cent, he said, adding that a candidate needed 356 votes to get elected.
Of all the valid votes, Dhankhar secured 74.36 per cent. He has the highest winning margin in the last six vice presidential elections held since 1997. Though the TMC had announced boycotting the vice-presidential elections on the ground that the joint opposition candidate was selected without consulting the party, two of its MPs Shishir Adhikari and Debyandu Adhikari had cast their votes. While two BJP MPs – Sunny Deol and Sanjay Dhotre – did not vote, among the prominent opposition MPs who were absent during voting included Mulayam Singh Yadav and Shafiqur Rahman Barq (both Samajwadi Party).
Margaret Alva congratulated Dhankhar on the win. She also thanked leaders of the Opposition, and MPs from across parties who voted for her in this election. “This election is over. The battle for protecting our Constitution, strengthening our democracy & restoring the dignity of Parliament, will continue,” she said.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, along with BJP chief JP Nadda, went to congratulate Dhankhar on his election. Dhankhar, a Jat, was born in 1951 into a farmer’s family in Kithana, a small village in Rajasthan.
Dhankhar had the support of several other non-NDA parties – Naveen Patnaik’s Biju Janata Dal, Jaganmohan Reddy’s YSR Congress, Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party, Chandrababu Naidu’s Telugu Desam Party, the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha, Akali Dal and the Eknath Shinde faction of the Shiv Sena.
Telangana Rashtra Samithi, Aam Aadmi Party and the nine MPs of Shiv Sena’s Uddhav Thackeray faction supported Ms Alva. In the last election, Opposition candidate Gopalkrishna Gandhi had received 32 per cent of votes. Under the system of proportional representation by a single transferable vote, the elector has to mark preferences against the names of the candidates.
The counting of votes for the vice-presidential election had begun at 6pm after 92.4 per cent of the members of Parliament cast their ballots between 10 A.M. and 5 P.M. on Saturday with prime minister Narendra Modi and his predecessor Manmohan Singh being among the early voters for the vice-presidential elections.
There were eight vacancies in Rajya Sabha – four from Jammu and Kashmir, three nominated and one from Tripura. There are 543 members in Lok Sabha and 237 in Rajya Sabha.
Dhankhar, a lawyer by profession, joined politics in 1989. He became the governor of West Bengal in July 2019 and has made headlines since then over his tumultuous relations with the Mamata Banerjee government. He tendered his resignation as the governor of West Bengal on being named the vice-presidential candidate by the NDA.
The vice president of India, which is the second-highest constitutional post in the country, is elected through an electoral college consisting of members of the Rajya Sabha and the Lok Sabha.
