Hold both Gujarat RS polls together: Congress
While if the polls to both the seats are held simultaneously, both the parties are expected to get one seat each.
New Delhi: Congress on Thursday demanded that Rajya Sabha elections in Gujarat should be held simultaneously. Union home minister Amit Shah’s Rajya Sabha seat was declared vacant on May 28 after he won his first Lok Sabha election from Gandhinagar in Gujarat in last month’s Lok Sabha election.
While Union textile minister Smriti Irani’s seat was notified as vacant a day later, she defeated Congress president Rahul Gandhi in his constituency, Amethi, in Uttar Pradesh.
Addressing a press conference Congress spokesman Dr Abhishek Manu Singhvi expressed the worry that the Election Commission (EC), which has faced questions about objectivity after some of its controversial decisions during the national election, would declare polls on different days because of separate notifications. He said, “If you have one election today and one after two weeks, four weeks, six weeks, then you will enable the ruling party’s MLAs to simply cross 51 per cent in the Assembly of Gujarat and elect one in the first round and one in the second round which is held after weeks.”
He added that the party had told the EC that if elections for the two seats were to be held on separate dates, it would be unconstitutional and illegal. “This would be playing with the MLAs’ mandate,” he said.
Dr Singhvi claimed that as per convention, whenever you have two seats of a state going vacant, elections are held together as it happened in the states of Haryana, Himachal Pradesh and Punjab.
The BJP has 99 MLAs in Gujarat while the Congress has 77 MLAs in Gujarat so the Congress said that if the polls are staggered the BJP will win both the seats. While if the polls to both the seats are held simultaneously, both the parties are expected to get one seat each.