How BJP sacrificed a Rajya Sabha seat to throw opposition into disarray in UP

LUCKNOW: BJP deliberately shut the window of opportunity to bag an additional seat in Rajya Sabha by not fielding its ninth candidate even as BSP managed to get its candidate, Ramji Gautam, sail through with support of 10 MLAs. And with this BJP deftly decimated any probability of a covert or overt electoral understanding between SP and BSP in future with Mayawati venting her spleen at her former ally, Akhilesh Yadav on Thursday while suspending seven party MLAs who opposed Gautam’s candidature.

A candidate in the RS fray was required to bag 37 votes. This way, BJP with a strength of 304 MLAs would have been left with eight candidates. But with support of nine MLAs of ally Apna Dal, the ninth BJP nominee would have easily garnered 17 votes.

BSP MLA Anil Singh, SP MLA Nitin Agarwal and Congress MLA Rakesh Singh are already inclined towards BJP. And BJP’s ninth candidate would have touched the 20 vote-mark, which would have been more than BSP candidate Ramji Gautam or SP candidate Prakash Bajaj. Gautam and Bajaj would have been left with only 10 votes each. Even support of former BJP ally Suheldev Bhartiya Samaj party (SBSP), which has been hobnobbing with SP, would not have tipped the scales for the SP candidate. A senior BJP leader confided there was certainly a chance for an additional candidate to sail through as the party and its ally had enough numbers. “The party could have hoped of receiving additional support from Independent candidates as well,” he said. Party sources said, the state BJP unit sent a list of 15 candidates to the party central leadership, which eventually finalised names of eight candidates only.




This was in sharp contrast to 2018 when the party fielded 11 candidates, which was three more than the requisite number. The three additional candidates included former MLA Vidhya Sagar Sonkar, former MP Salil Bishnoi and a Ghaziabad-based businessman Anil Agarwal. Later, Sonkar and Bishnoi withdrew nominations leaving Agarwal in the fray. Agarwal eventually won by defeating BSP’s Bhim Rao Ambedkar on priority of votes polled. This was despite Ambedkar gaining extra votes of SP and votes of Congress legislators and an RLD MLA.

Experts said, this time BJP was in no mood to take on BSP even though it did not have requisite numbers or support of SP and Congress. “SP could sense the growing bonhomie between BJP and BSP and planned to expose this ahead of bypolls and then for the mother of all battles in 2022,” said the analyst.