S Jaishankar, the Gujarati candidate for the Rajya Sabha and minister of external affairs and leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party, was elected without opposition.
Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, the minister of external affairs and leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party, and two other party members were elected to the Rajya Sabha from Gujarat on Monday without facing any opposition. Along with Jaishankar, two additional BJP candidates were chosen for a six-year tenure in the Upper House of Parliament: Kesridevsinh Jhala and Babubhai Desai. The politician-turned-diplomat Jaishankar will be serving his second term in the Rajya Sabha from the BJP-ruled state after being appointed to the Union Cabinet in 2019.
According to a PTI report, the three candidates have been deemed to have been elected “uncontested” by returning officer Reeta Mehta. The RO announced on the National eVidhan Application website that Kesridevsinh Digvijaysinh Jhala, Desai Babubhai Jesangbhai, and Subrahmanyam Jaishankar Krishnaswami “have been declared elected uncontested on July 17.”
Nominations were to be submitted by Monday in order to be considered, and voting was scheduled for July 24 if necessary. Because it lacked enough MLAs in the 182-member Assembly, the opposition Congress had previously declared that it would not run candidates for the three Rajya Sabha seats in Gujarat. On July 10, Jaishankar submitted his nomination, and on July 12, Jhala and Desai did the same. According to the article, Jhala and Desai were nominated after the BJP opted not to renominate the two Gujarati Rajya Sabha MPs whose mandates were about to expire, Jugalji Thakor and Dinesh Anavadiya.
In the late-year elections for the Assembly, the saffron party had won a record 156 seats, while the Congress had performed poorly—gaining just 17 seats—since the state had been created. Elections were not held in six West Bengal seats and one Goa seat since there were no rival candidates, similar to what happened in the three seats in Gujarat. BJP candidates Sadanand Shet Tanavade of Goa and Anant Maharaj of West Bengal both won their seats without a fight. Along with Derek O’Brien, Sukhendu Sekhar Roy, Dola Sen, Saket Gokhale, Samirul Islam, an
