Voting for the three Rajya Sabha seats in Madhya Pradesh will be held on June 18.
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The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Sunday named Mahesh Kewat, chairman of the Fishermen Welfare Board, as its third candidate for the election. Kewat will contest against Natarajan for the third seat.
On Monday, Leader of Opposition in the MP assembly Umang Singhar, state Congress President Jitu Patwari and former chief minister Digvijaya Singh accompanied Natarajan as she presented her nomination papers to the Returning Officer and the assembly’s principal secretary, Arvind Sharma.
The Congress expressed confidence of winning the seat despite the BJP’s decision last night ahead of the last day of filing nominations to field Kewat.
“Our candidate will win 500 per cent,” Patwari told reporters.The BJP’s decision to field the third candidate despite not having sufficient numbers exposed its tall claim over supporting women and tabling the Women’s Reservation Bill in Parliament, he said.
This has exposed the ruling party’s acts and deeds as it has opposed a woman candidate fielded by the Congress for one seat, Patwari said.
Natarajan, while thanking the party leadership and MLAs for nominating her for the Rajya Sabha polls, said, “It is a fight for the Gandhian ideology versus the BJP’s divisive politics.”
By announcing a candidate for the third seat despite lacking the numbers, the BJP has exposed its tactics, character and face, she claimed.
The BJP often uses such opportunities to try to poach MLAs and weaken democracy, Natarajan alleged. “But this time, their ploy will fail in Madhya Pradesh,” she added.
Singhar also expressed confidence of Congress’s victory in the Rajya Sabha polls and said that the BJP’s decision to field a candidate against the Congress is a “fight between Gandhiji’s ideology and that of Nathuram Godse”.
Currently, the effective vote count in the 230-member Madhya Pradesh assembly is 228. Of these, the BJP has 164 MLAs and the Congress has 64.
Due to the unclear status of Bina MLA Nirmala Sapre’s vote, which appears to be leaning towards the BJP, and the ban on the voting of Vijaypur MLA Mukesh Malhotra, the Congress’s effective tally has been reduced to 62.
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Each candidate needs 58 votes to win in the Rajya Sabha polls.
Consequently, the BJP needs 116 votes to win two seats. After casting 116 votes out of a total of 164, the BJP will have 48 remaining, while it will need an additional 10 votes to secure the third seat, party sources said.
The Congress has the required numbers to win one seat, but the BJP’s announcement of a third candidate has increased its concerns and made Natarajan’s election path difficult.
