In anticipation of cross-voting, the top whip for the Samajwadi Party quits

A day after he and eight other lawmakers skipped a meeting on the polls, the top whip of the opposition Samajwadi Party (SP) in the Uttar Pradesh assembly resigned on Tuesday ahead of elections to fill 15 Rajya Sabha seats across three states due to concerns about cross-voting.

Ten seats in Uttar Pradesh, four in Karnataka, and one in Himachal Pradesh were up for election today. This comes only weeks before the country’s summer elections, in which 41 candidates were elected to the Upper House of Parliament without any opposition.

Manoj Kumar Pandey informed Akhilesh Yadav, the head of the SP, in writing of his desire to resign as chief whip. Pandey, an MP from Raebareli’s Unchahar, served as a minister in the previous SP administration. He was one of eight members of the Samajwadi Party who did not attend Yadav’s call to inform parliamentarians about the Rajya Sabha voting procedure.

The eight did not attend the meeting or a meal, according to SP spokesman Rajendra Chaudhary, who was cited by the news agency Press Trust of India (PTI).

In order to win elections, Yadav criticized the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for using “all means.” “Those who sought to take advantage of the circumstances will go. When questioned about the lack of parliamentarians from the SP from his meeting, he said, “Those who were promised will go.” “What transpired in Chandigarh in front of CCTV cameras is what you have seen. He expressed gratitude to the Supreme Court for saving the Constitution in the wake of vote manipulation in the Chandigarh mayoral elections.

According to Yadav, the BJP may use any tactic to win over voters. It had to have promised a certain amount of money… He said, “The BJP will stop at nothing to win.”

In the Rajya Sabha, the governing BJP and SP may send seven and three members, respectively. Sanjay Seth is the ninth candidate that the BJP has put out. 2019 saw Seth, an industrialist and former leader of the SP, join the BJP. Seth might be elected if any SP legislators cast cross-votes.

There are 403 members in the Uttar Pradesh legislature; the BJP has 252 and the SP 108. In the House, the BJP-led coalition is effectively 287 strong. A candidate from Uttar Pradesh has to get 37 first-preference votes in order to be elected to the Rajya Sabha.

The SP has declared the names of its three preferred candidates: actress Jaya Bachchan, former bureaucrat Alok Ranjan, and Ramji Lal Suman.

The governing Congress said it was sure of winning three seats ahead of the vote for the four Rajya Sabha seats in Karnataka. It also claimed it may get the support of two independents and the lone member of Sarvodaya Karnataka Paksha.

In response to concerns about cross-voting, the Congress and the BJP-Janata Dal (Secular), or JD(S), alliance deployed their parliamentarians to resorts on Monday and educated new members about the election procedure.

With the Speaker excluded, the Congress has 133 members in the 223-member House, compared to 66 for the BJP and 19 for the JD(S). In advance of Monday’s elections, Kalyana Rajya Pragathi Paksha MP G Janardhana Reddy met with Chief Minister Siddaramaiah.

For a candidate to win, they must get 45 votes. The candidates running for office are Ajay Maken, Syed Naseer Hussain, G C Chandrasekhar of the Congress, Narayansa Bandage of the BJP, and Kupendra Reddy of the JD(S). The Congress needs one more vote to guarantee victory for all three of its nominees.

According to the philosophy of the governing Congress, legislators in Himachal Pradesh voted for the state’s lone Rajya Sabha seat, according to chief minister Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu.

Legislators have a democratic right to vote, according to BJP leader Jai Ram Thakur, and the candidate does not have to win an election without any opposition. “We hope that all lawmakers will cast their conscious votes. We have fielded the candidate gauging the situation,” he said.

In Himachal Pradesh, the BJP has selected Harsh Mahajan to challenge Congressman Abhishek Manu Singhvi. A candidate requires thirty-five votes to win. There are forty members of Congress, and three of them are independents. There are 25 MPs in the BJP.

Legislators were whipped by the Congress to support Singhvi. The BJP filed a protest claiming the whip might influence legislators’ capacity to make decisions, claiming the governing Congress did so to put pressure on them.

Tuesday’s voting session started at 9 a.m. and will end at 4 p.m. The counting will begin at 5:00 p.m.