Rajya Sabha elections for 56 seats on February 27

Animesh Singh

New Delhi, January 29

The Election Commission (EC) will hold the biennial Rajya Sabha elections on February 27 for 56 seats from 15 states as the tenure of incumbents, including former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and BJP president JP Nadda, will end in April.

The nomination process will begin on February 8 with the issuance of the notification. While the terms of 50 members will end on April 2, six will retire on April 3, the EC said.

Uttar Pradesh will have the highest vacancies at 10. It is followed by Bihar and Maharashtra (six each), Madhya Pradesh and West Bengal (five each), Karnataka and Gujarat (four each), Odisha, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan (three each), and Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana and Chhattisgarh (one each). The vacancies also include seats held by Union ministers Ashwini Vaishnaw, Dharmendra Pradhan, Bhupender Yadav and Mansukh Mandaviya.

Nadda may have to hunt for a seat away from his home state of Himachal Pradesh for renomination, as the lone seat from there will go to the Congress, which is in power there.

From Uttar Pradesh, BJP members Anil Agrawal, Ashok Bajpai, Anil Jain, Kanta Kardam, Sakaldeep Rajbhar, GVL Narasimha Rao, Vijay Pal Singh Tomar, Sudhanshu Trivedi and Harnath Singh Yadav as well as SP member Jaya Bachchan are retiring.

JD(U) members Aneel Prasad Hegde and Bashistha Narain Singh, BJP member Sushil Kumar Modi and Congress member Akhilesh Prasad Singh are completing their tenures from Bihar.

BJP members Saroj Pandey and DP Vats are retiring from Chhattisgarh and Haryana, respectively.

In Rajasthan, the terms of ex-PM Manmohan Singh and Union Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav are ending. With the BJP having won the Assembly polls in Rajasthan last month, the saffron party is set to gain two seats there.

The Congress is expected to add to its tally in the upper House from states like Telangana and Karnataka, where it won Assembly elections last year. In Karnataka, four Rajya Sabha members are retiring, while in Telangana three are retiring.