Puri is BJP candidate for RS poll from UP
NEWDELHI: The Bharatiya Janata Party on Friday fielded Housing and Urban Development Minister Hardeep Singh Puri as its candidate for the Rajya Sabha election from Uttar Pradesh.
Given BJP’s two-thirds majority in the state asssembly, Puri is set to get elected unopposed.
Election will take place on January 16 for the lone Rajya Sabha seat, which fell vacant following resignation of then Defence Minister Manohar Par- rikar. He resigned as Rajya Sabha members on September 2 to return as Goa chief minister. Term of this seat is up to November 2020. Nine more Rajya Sabha seat from Uttar Pradesh will fall vacant in April next year.
A former diplomat, Puri is not a member of Parliament. He was inducted in the union council of minister in September and, by law, he has to get elected to either of the two houses of Parliament within six months of becoming a minister. Tourism Minister K J Alphons, too, was not a member of Parliament when inducted in the union council of minister. He got elected to the Rajya Sabha from Rajasthan last month.
Meanwhile, a newly-elected legislator of ruling Bharatiya Janata Party on Friday took oath as the member of the assembly. Ajeet Pal, who was sworn-in by Speaker Hriday Narayan Dixit, was elected from Sikandara assembly constituency of Kanpur rural at a recent bypoll necessitated after the death of sitting member and his father Mathura Pal. He received 73,325 votes, defeating his nearest rival, Samajwadi Party’s Seema Sachan who got 61,423.
Congress candidate Prabhakar Pandey polled 19,090 votes. Opposition candidates had alleged rigging by manipulation of the EVMs and had walked out of the counting station.