Vice President election 2022: The Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) parliamentary board met to pick a candidate for Vice President election 2022. PM Narendra Modi, BJP chief JP Nadda, Union Ministers Amit Shah, Nitin Gadkari, Rajnath Singh, BJP National General Secretary BL Santosh & Madhya Pradesh CM Shivraj Singh Chouhan were present at the meeting.
The BJP parliamentary board will pick the party's candidate for the post of Vice President of the country. The parliamentary board is the BJP's apex organisational body, and its members include PM Modi and Union ministers Amit Shah, Rajnath Singh, and Nitin Gadkari besides party president J P Nadda, among others. The BJP will consult its allies like the JD(U) and also reach out to different parties to seek a consensus over the choice, amid indications that the opposition will also field its candidate to force a contest, as it has for the presidential poll.
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The BJP is in a strong position to ensure the win of its candidate. The electoral college for picking the next vice president, who is also the Rajya Sabha chairperson, comprises members of the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha. Out of Parliament's current strength of 780, the BJP alone has 394 MPs, more than the majority mark of 390. The term of Naidu, the present incumbent, ends on August 10. The last date for filing nomination papers for the poll is July 19 and the election is scheduled for August 6.
In 2017, the party had named the then Cabinet minister M Venkaiah Naidu, a former BJP president and veteran parliamentarian, as its vice president candidate, after surprising everyone by picking the then Bihar governor Ram Nath Kovind, a Dalit, for the presidential contest. Both Kovind and Naidu had won the polls comfortably to occupy the two highest constitutional posts of the country.
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