59 RS SEATS UP FOR GRABS, BUT ALL EYES ON ONE IN UP

LUCKNOW: As legislators across 19 states on Friday vote to elect 59 members to the Rajya Sabha, all eyes are fixed on a single seat in Uttar Pradesh.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is assured of winning at least eight out of the 10 Rajya Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh while the Samajwadi Party (SP) is set to win one. But the final seat — for which the BJP takes on a Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) candidate backed by the SP and the Congress — is being seen as a key political battle after the recent bypolls in Gorakhpur and Phulpur.

Apart from the 10 seats from UP, six seats each from Bihar and Maharashtra, five each from Madhya Pradesh and West Bengal, four each from Gujarat and Karnataka, three each from Odisha, Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, two from Jharkhand and one each from Haryana, Chhattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, and Kerala will also be decided.

A victory for the BJP’S ninth candidate in the fray, Anil Agarwal, would mean defeat for joint opposition candidate Bhimrao Ambedkar of the BSP.

BJP (311) and its allies Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party (4) and Apna Dal (9) have a total of 324 votes, 296 of which will be needed to get eight candidates elected to the upper House, leaving only 28 surplus votes for the ruling party in Uttar Pradesh, nine short of the required number for its ninth candidate .

Each candidate needs 37 votes to be elected and the SP’S Jaya Bachchan, whose party has 47 votes, is expected to win.