Gandhinagar: In a tepid finish to what was shaping up to be another fiercely-fought election, four candidates — BJP’s Mansukh Mandaviya and Parshottam Rupala and Congress’s Naran Rathwa and Ami Yagnik — have been declared elected unopposed to the the four Rajya Sabha seats from Gujarat which had fallen vacant recently.
BJP sources said that they had smelled a chance to wrest an extra seat, hoping that Rathwa’s nomination would be cancelled on technical grounds. They abandoned these plans after Rathwa’s papers were approved.
After reaching an understanding, both parties on Thursday withdrew their third and dummy candidates, allowing two candidates each to be elected unopposed to the Upper House. “BJP’s Union ministers Parshottam Rupala and Mansukh Mandaviya, and Congress candidates Naran Rathwa and Ami Yagnik are declared elected unopposed,” returning officer for the Rajya Sabha elections, A V Karova, said. “On the last day of withdrawal of nomination forms, BJP candidate Kirsitsinh Rana and Independent nominee P K Valera, along with other dummy candidates, withdrew their papers, leaving only four candidates,” he said. Sources said the understand was arrived at after a meeting between Gujarat BJP president Jitu Vaghani, minister of state for home Pradipsinh Jadeja and Congress whip Shailesh Parmar. Leaders of both parties and their third nominees went to the returning officer’s office together to withdraw the nominations.
Gujarat BJP president Jitu Vaghani said, “As the Congress candidate’s form has been accepted by the RO, we withdrew our third candidate as both parties can nominate two candidates in proportion to their number of MLAs.” The Congress’s chief whip in the assembly, Shailesh Parmar, said, “As BJP had earlier wrongly staked a claim for the third seat but withdrew their nomination, we agreed to withdraw nomination of the independent candidate.”
