In the end, perhaps, it was a single vote from the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), along with the single-mindedness with which the Congress mounted a counter-offensive at the Election Commission in Delhi against what it termed as “the BJP’s machinations”, that saw Ahmed Patel retain his Rajya Sabha seat with just 44 votes.
The Congress had calculated that the 44 MLAs it had flown to Benguluru after rebellion broke out in its Gujarat unit, along with one Janata Dal (United) MLA and two NCP MLAs would ensure Mr. Patel’s victory.
NCP led to confusion
But the NCP’s mixed signals were worrying: even its leadership had warned Mr. Patel that one of its MLAs, Kandhal Jadeja, was in touch with Mr. Vaghela. To this, Mr. Patel had urged the NCP to “issue a whip to bind its member”. On Tuesday, predictably, Mr. Jadeja voted for Balvantsinh Rajput, the BJP’s third RS candidate. However, on Wednesday, the party’s Gujarat in-charge, Praful Patel, confirmed that its other MLA, Jayant Patel, had voted for Mr. Ahmed.
On the voting day, two Vaghela supporters, still officially with the Congress, voted for the BJP, while the votes of the JD(U) and NCP MLAs seemed uncertain. Once the Congress was sure that two of its MLAs who had cross-voted had shown their ballot papers to the BJP rather than to the Congress’s polling agent, thus, violating Rules, Mr. Ahmed Patel swung into action. He alerted Congress chief spokesperson Randeep Surjewala, who rushed off to the Election Commission along with R.P.N. Singh to complain that the Returning Officer had improperly rejected the objection of Mr. Patel’s authorised representative that two Congress MLAs had violated the voting procedure.
Surjewala’s contention
Mr. Surjewala also quoted a precedent from his own experience – in June 2016 during the Haryana Rajya Sabha polls, he had shown his ballot paper to Congress Legislature Party leader Kiran Chowdhury (who was not her party’s polling agent and therefore, an unauthorised person) and his vote was rejected. After Mr. Surjewala and Mr. Singh left the EC, a high-powered BJP delegation, headed by Union Minister Arun Jaitley arrived to counter the Congress. Meanwhile, the Congress Working Committee was meeting at the AICC headquarters to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Quit India Movement.
Party leaders – Dr. Manmohan Singh, P. Chidambaram, Anand Sharma, Digvijaya Singh, Ambika Soni and Mukul Wasnik – followed Congress president Sonia Gandhi into her office, a CWC source said, to urge her to send a high-profile Congress delegation to the EC, as the BJP had deployed ministers “to exert pressure.”
So Mr. Chidambaram, Mr. Digvijaya Singh, Mr. Sharma, along with Mr. Surjewala and Mr. Singh, visited the Election Commission. Here, it was, as party sources said, Mr. Chidambaram’s “clinical preciseness” in explaining the legal niceties that came to the aid of Mr. Patel’s case. And the EC ruled in the Congress’s favour.