The Congress party on Tuesday expelled six of its MLAs in Uttar Pradesh for cross voting against party candidate Kapil Sibal in the recently-held Rajya Sabha elections. However, the party is unlikely to take similar action against its 14 MLAs in Haryana whose votes were declared invalid and two of its MLAs in Jharkhand who did not vote for a Congress-backed JMM candidate.
The Congress MLAs in Uttar Pradesh who have been expelled for six years are: Sanjay Pratap Jayaswal (Basti district), Madhuri Verma (Bahraich), Vijay Dube (Kushinagar), Mohammed Muslim (Tiloi-Amethi), Dil Nawaz Khan (Bulandshahar) and Nawab Kasim Ali Khan (Rampur).
AICC general-secretary Janardan Dwivedi announced the decision in the presence of senior leader Ghulam Nabi Azad who was the party’s authorised representative in the Rajya Sabha elections in Uttar Pradesh last Saturday.
Mr Sibal edged past BJP-backed Preeti Mahapatra in the cliffhanger and secured his Rajya Sabha berth with support from other parties.
With only 25 first preference votes to his credit, and his final tally adding up to 34, Mr Sibal fared only marginally better than his MLC colleague Deepak Singh did in the UP legislative council polls on Friday.
Mr Azad said that while three of the six expelled MLAs voted in favour of the BJP, three others sided with the BSP.
He alleged that the cross voting in Uttar Pradesh and the controversy in Haryana showed that the BJP went all out to win the polls through “misuse of power”.
Attacking the BJP for putting up Ms Mahapatra as an additional candidate when it had as many as 27 fewer than the required number of votes, he said this was the first such example he was seeing in his long political career.
Taking a jibe at Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Mr Azad said that while the PM talks of cooperative federalism on the one hand, the ruling party at the Centre uses money power and government influence to win Rajya Sabha elections through unfair means.
