EC announces Council polls for state’s 7 seats on June 20

Patna: The Election Commission (EC) on Wednesday announced that polling to fill seven vacant seats in the Bihar legislative council will be held on June 20.
The schedule for the biennial election was fixed ahead of the July 21 retirement of seven members.
Of the seven, who are retiring, five members belong to the JD(U), one hails from the BJP (Arjun Sahni) and another (Mukesh Sahni) from the VIP. The five JD(U) MLCs who are set to retire happens to be Md Qamar Alam, Gulam Rasool, Ranvijay Kumar Singh, C P Sinha and Rozina Nazish. Interestingly, six of the seven MLCs who are retiring are from the NDA camp. Sahni too was earlier in the NDA camp.
While Mukesh and Rozina were elected in two separate by-elections in January and September last year, the remaining five members, Qamar, Gulam, Ranvijay, C P Sinha and Arjun, were elected in July 2016. These five members are retiring after completing their full term of six years in the upper house. But the VIP president Mukesh and Rozina are retiring after remaining MLCs for only 18 and 10 months, respectively.
As per the EC’s schedule, the notification for the biennial election would be issued on June 2, while the last date for nominations will be June 9. Scrutiny of nominations will be held on June 10 and June 13 is the last date for withdrawal of candidature.
Polling, if necessary, will be held from 9 am to 4 pm on June 20 and all processes of election would be completed by June 22, the EC said.