New Delhi: All five Rajya Sabha nominees, four from Grand Alliance and one from BJP, and seven Bihar Legislative Council candidates were on Friday declared elected unopposed in the biennial elections.
Returning officer for both elections RS Rai said all five Rajya Sabha candidates and seven state Legislative Council candidates were elected unopposed as none of the candidates withdrew their nomination papers on the last day today.
The candidates elected unopposed to the Rajya Sabha are: eminent lawyer Ram Jethmalani, RJD chief Lalu Prasad's daughter Misa Bharati, JD(U) leaders Sharad Yadav and RCP Singh, and Gopal Narayan Singh of BJP.
With this results, the tally of parties for the 16 Upper House seats from Bihar will be JD(U) - nine, BJP - five and RJD - two. The RJD also has one Rajya Sabha member from Jharkhand state. He is Premchand Gupta.
Also, all seven candidates for the Bihar Legislative Council (five of Grand Alliance and two BJP nominees) were elected unopposed yesterday evening.
In Maharashtra, Union Power Minister Piyush Goyal of the BJP and senior Congress leader and former finance minister P Chidambaram were also unopposed to the Upper House. Others who were elected unopposed were former union minister Praful Patel (Nationalist Congress Party), BJP's Vinay Sahasrabuddhe and Vikas Mahatme, and Sanjay Raut of the Shiv Sena.
Also the 10 candidates, including former Maharashtra chief minister Narayan Rane, who had filed nomination papers for 10 seats of the Legislative Council, were also elected unopposed.
Tami Nadu too recorded unanimous election. The candidates declared elected were AIADMK's R Vaithilingam, A Navaneethakrishnan, A Vijayakumar, former union minister SR Balasubramoniyan and DMK nominees RS Bharathi and TKS Elangovan.
In Odisha, senior Biju Janata Dal leaders Prasanna Acharya, Bishnu Das and N Bhaskar Rao were elected, while Punjab sent senior Congress leader Ambika Soni and Akali Dal leader Balwinder Singh Bhunder to the Upper House.
Railway Minister Suresh Prabhakar Prabhu, Union Minister of State for Science and Technology Y Satyanarayana Chowdary were elected from Andhra Pradesh along with TG Venkatesh and V Vijaysai Reddy.
Now, only Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Karnataka will witness polls for their respective Rajya Sabha seats on June 11.
