Amid Early Up Assembly Poll Buzz Rajya Sabha Legislative Council Elections Also In Focus

Amid the buzz about early Uttar Pradesh assembly polls, biennial elections for 10 Rajya Sabha seats and 21 Legislative Council seats falling vacant at the year-end and early next year are also in focus.

The term of 10 Rajya Sabha members from UP ends on November 25 and eight of them belong to the BJP – Brij Lal, Dinesh Sharma, Geeta Shakya, Union minister Hardeep Singh Puri, Seema Dwivedi, Neeraj Shekhar, Arun Singh and BL Verma. Ram Gopal Yadav represents the Samajwadi Party (SP) and Ramji Lal Gautam the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). Rajya Sabha members are chosen by elected members of the state assembly.

In the 403-member UP assembly, the BJP and its allies have 290 MLAs, the SP has 102 MLAs, the Congress two, the BSP has one, and the Jansatta Dal Loktantrik has two MLAs. Three MLAs are unattached.

While the BJP can shore up its numbers in the Rajya Sabha, the BSP’s representation will end with Gautam’s exit.

Political observers feel the BJP would like to hold the Rajya Sabha elections before the assembly polls. This would boost party workers’ morale by increasing its tally in the upper house and allow the party to accommodate leaders from various castes, including OBCs and Dalits, to counter the SP’s PDA (Pichda, Dalit, Alpsankhyak) formula.

In the February 2024 Rajya Sabha election, the BJP won eight seats, one more than expected, due to cross-voting by some SP MLAs in favour of the BJP. The BJP may adopt the same strategy again to demoralise the SP before the assembly polls.

A senior BJP leader said the biennial elections for 10 Rajya Sabha seats are likely to be held in October and the elected members will take the oath at the end of November after the sitting members’ term ends.

Earlier too, the election to the upper house was held two to three months before the sitting members’ term expired, he said.

The BJP would also like the Council elections to be held before the assembly polls to give momentum to its campaign, upset the Opposition’s applecart by winning the maximum seats in the Council, address the aspirations of various caste and social groups by sending their members to the Vidhan Parishad.

The term of 11 members from the graduate and teachers’ constituencies ends on December 6 – Avnish Kumar Singh, Ashutosh Sinha, Man Singh Yadav, Manvendra Pratap Singh, Dinesh Kumar Goyal, Hari Singh Dhillon, Umesh Dwivedi, Dhruv Kumar Tripathi, Lal Bihari Yadav, Srichand Sharma and Akash Agrawal.

The term of another 10 members will expire on January 30, 2027 – Kunwar Manvendra Singh, Dharmendra Singh, Swatantra Singh, Arvind Kumar Sharma, Ashwani Tyagi, Govind Narayan, Dharmveer Prajapati, Salil Vishnoi and Surendra Chaudhary.

In the 100-member Council, the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) has 83 members, including 79 MLCs of the BJP alone. The SP has 10 MLCs.

Officials in the UP chief electoral officer’s office said they had not received communication from the Election Commission of India about an early assembly election but the poll machinery would be ready if such a decision is taken due to the second phase of the Census work (population and caste enumeration) scheduled for February 2027.

If the assembly polls are held in February 2027, government employees from the same pool will have to be deployed for both the poll and census work, leading to a potential shortage of personnel, an officer said.

The final electoral rolls of Uttar Pradesh published by ECI after completion of the Special Intensive Process (SIR) process has 133.9 million (13.39 crore) voters after dropping 20.4 million (2.04 crore) names. The ECI is updating the electoral rolls with the enrolment of new voters.

SP leader Rajendra Chaudhary said his party is ready for an early assembly election and the exercise to strengthen the organisation from the state unit to the booth level is being completed.

BSP chief Mayawati has already directed her party leaders to start preparing for assembly elections, which, she said, may be held in January.

Rajesh Kumar Singh is Assistant Editor, Hindustan Times at the political bureau in Lucknow. Along with covering politics, he covers government departments. He also travels to write human interest and investigative stories.Read More