No Rajya Sabha vote on Friday: all 12 seats from UP, Uttarakhand and Bengal went unopposed

Friday was meant to be polling day for 12 Rajya Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand and West Bengal. No MLA will vote. Every seat was settled a week ago, when no contest remained in any of the three states.

In Uttar Pradesh, the BJP’s eight candidates and the Samajwadi Party’s two were declared elected unopposed on 9 October after the nominations of two independents were rejected at scrutiny. Returning Officer Ajit Kumar Verma handed over the certificates that day. With that, the 16 October poll was no longer needed.

The BJP’s new members from the state are Dharm Pal Singh, a minister in the state government, Prakash Pal, the state president of the party’s OBC Morcha, Shruti Gangwar, Vidyasagar Sonkar, Priyanka Singh Rawat, Radhakant Ojha, Gopi Krishna Pandey and Ram Pratap Singh Chauhan. The SP has re-elected its senior leader Ram Gopal Yadav and sent the industrialist Dhanraj Parimal Nathwani to the House for the first time.

The result leaves the BJP with the eight UP seats it already held from this batch, lifts the SP’s tally among the state’s members to five, alongside Javed Ali, Ramji Lal Suman and Jaya Bachchan, and ends the BSP’s representation from Uttar Pradesh. The outgoing members’ terms end on 25 November.

In Uttarakhand, the BJP’s Dinesh Kumar Arya, a Dalit leader from the Kumaon region, was returned unopposed when no other party filed a nomination. In West Bengal, the actor Rukmini Mallick, known as Koel Mallick, who joined the BJP recently, won the bypoll to one seat unopposed.