New Delhi, Former West Bengal governor and National Democratic Alliance’s (NDA) Jagdeep Dhankhar, 71, was on Saturday elected the 14th Vice President of India, defeating joint opposition candidate Margaret Alva by 346 votes.
While announcing the result, General Secretary of Lok Sabha Utpal Kumar Singh said that out of the total 725 votes, Dhankhar got 528 votes, while Alva got 182 votes. Fifteen votes were declared invalid. The overall voter turnout was 92.94 percent.
Dhankhar will succeed incumbent Vice President M. Venkaiah Naidu, whose five-year term ends on August 10.
The Vice President of India is elected through an electoral college made up of members from both the Rajya Sabha and the Lok Sabha. The electoral college consists of 780 MPs – 543 in the Lok Sabha and 245 in the Rajya Sabha.
NDA has 441 MPs, which includes 394 MPs of BJP. Besides this, five nominated members also supported Dhankhar, taking the NDA’s total strength to 464.
Of the 780 MPs, 725 voted on Saturday. While there are 8 vacant seats in the Rajya Sabha, 34 Trinamool MPs abstained from voting and two BJP MPs – Sunny Deol and Sanjay Dhotre – could not vote due to unwell. 15 votes were rejected.
Among the opposition parties, the Biju Janata Dal (BJD), NDA, YSR Congress Party, All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, Bahujan Samaj Party, Telugu Desam Party, Akali Dal and the faction of Eknath Shinde are known. Shiv Sena supported Dhankhar. These seven parties have a total of 81 MPs.
The Trinamool Congress with 36 MPs decided to abstain from voting. Parliament sources, however, said that two Trinamool MPs – Sishir Adhikari and his son Dibyendu Adhikari – voted in the vice-presidential election defying the party’s directive.
Major opposition parties supporting Alva include Congress, Aam Aadmi Party, Nationalist Congress Party, Jharkhand Mukti Morcha, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, Rashtriya Janata Dal, Telangana Rashtra Samithi, Samajwadi Party, Left and nine MPs from Shiv Sena’s Uddhav Thackeray faction. Huh. ,
One of the leading lawyers of Rajasthan, Dhankhar has practiced in both the Rajasthan High Court and the Supreme Court of India, and his legal skills are expected to come in handy for his role as the Speaker of the Rajya Sabha.
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Thorn in favor of Mamta
Dhankhar, described By BJP President JP Naddafarmer son‘ (son of a farmer), was born in a remote village of Jhunjhunu in a farming family. He completed his schooling from Chittorgarh and obtained his LLB degree from Rajasthan University in 1979.
The lawyer entered politics in 1989 and has been in public life for more than three decades.
His tenure as the Governor of West Bengal since 2019 was marked by constant conflict with Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee. So much so that in January this year, the Trinamool chief blocked Dhankhar on the microblogging platform Twitter.
The latest flashpoint between the two was when the West Bengal Assembly passed a bill Demanded to appoint CM Mamta Banerjee as chancellor of 17 state universities in place of Dhankhar.
In December 2020A TMC delegation had written to President Ram Nath Kovind urging him to recall the governor.
Dhankhari For the first time in the 1989 Lok Sabha elections, he was elected MP from Jhunjhunu on a Janata Dal ticket. He served as the Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs in 1990. Later, in 1993, he was elected to the Rajasthan Legislative Assembly from Kishangarh in Ajmer district. He joined BJP in 2003.
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