V-P poll today, NDA has the edge

All eyes are on the vice-presidential election scheduled to take place on Tuesday, with ruling NDA nominee CP Radhakrishnan and opposition INDIA bloc candidate B Sudarshan Reddy — both from southern India — set to battle it out in a direct contest for the second highest constitutional office of the country.

The election was necessitated after Jagdeep Dhankhar resigned from the post of Vice-President on July 21, citing health reasons. Dhankhar had two years of his five-year tenure left when he, in a sudden turn of events, put in his papers. The elected Vice-President will get a full five-year term.

This made it only the third such instance in independent India, when a Vice-President resigned mid-term. Earlier, VV Giri and R Venkataraman had stepped down as vice-presidents to contest the presidential elections.

As per Article 66 of the Constitution, the Vice-President is elected by the members of the electoral college, comprising the members of both Houses of Parliament, in accordance with the system of proportional representation by means of the single transferable vote.

For the 17th vice-presidential election on Tuesday, the electoral college comprises 233 elected members of the Rajya Sabha (at present, five seats are vacant), and 12 nominated members of the Rajya Sabha, taking the current strength of the Upper House to 240. Also, of the 543 members of the Lok Sabha, one seat is vacant, which takes the Lower House number to 542. Therefore, the electoral college, on the basis of its current numbers, comprises a total of 782 members. Since, all electors are members of both Houses of Parliament, the value of the vote of each MP will be the same i.e. one.

The numbers are stacked in favour of the ruling NDA, which enjoys a clear majority in both Houses of Parliament. In the 542-member Lok Sabha, the BJP-led NDA enjoys the support of 293 members. The ruling alliance has the support of 129 members in the Rajya Sabha, which has an effective strength of 240.

With the combined strength of both Houses for the vice-presidential election being 782, 391 is the magic victory mark. The NDA, with support from 422 members, comfortably crosses that mark, thus giving it a commanding position in the key contest.

Interestingly, the BRS and the BJD have decided to stay away from the vice-presidential election.

The voting for the election will begin at 10 am on Tuesday and conclude at 5 pm. The counting of votes will begin at 6 pm the same day.

Two jailed MPs of the Lok Sabha — Sheikh Abdul Rashid, aka Engineer Rashid, an Independent MP from Baramulla, and Amritpal Singh, an Independent MP from Khadoor Sahib — will also vote in the election. While Rashid will physically vote in Parliament House amid police security (as he is currently lodged in Tihar Jail in an alleged terror funding case); Amritpal, who is lodged in Assam’s Dibrugarh Jail, will cast his vote through a postal ballot, which will be dispatched to Parliament before 6 pm on September 9. The Rajya Sabha Secretariat is conducting the election.

The NDA candidate for the vice-presidential poll is Maharashtra Governor CP Radhakrishnan, an OBC from the Goundar-Kongu Vellalar community. The 68-year-old BJP leader, an RSS ideologue, is known in the party as a soft-spoken, non-controversial figure, who is also the only BJP leader from Tamil Nadu to have been elected to the Lok Sabha twice in 1998 and 1999.

Former Supreme Court judge B Sudarshan Reddy is the INDIA bloc candidate for the election. Reddy (79) retired from the Supreme Court in July 2011, and is a jurist known for several landmark judgments criticising the then Union Government for showing slackness in probing black money cases. He had also declared Salwa Judum, formed by the Chhattisgarh Government to fight Naxals, as unconstitutional.

The Congress-led INDIA bloc has termed the election a fight to save the Constitution.