Rajya Sabha polls: BJP wins eight seats in Uttar Pradesh, SP bags two after cross-voting by MLAs

Lucknow: Large scale cross-voting in favour of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) saw the saffron party winning eight seats in the Rajya Sabha elections in Uttar Pradesh, while the Samajwadi Party (SP) could win only two seats.

According to the official sources here, all the eight BJP nominees emerged victorious while the main opposition party SP, whose seven MLAs reportedly voted for the saffron party candidates, could ensure victory for its two of the three candidates.

For the BJP, the winners included Choudhary Tejveer Singh, Amarpal Maurya, Sangeeta Balwant, Sudhanshu Trivedi, Sadhna Singh, Nadeem Jain, RPN Singh and Sanjay Seth.  Jaya Bachchan and Ramji Lal Suman were winners from the SP. The third SP nominee Alok Ranjan lost the poll.

According to the numbers in the assembly, seven candidates of the BJP and two from the SP were certain to win. The contest was mainly between BJP's eighth nominee Sanjay Seth and SP's third candidate Alok Ranjan.

As many as seven SP MLAs voted for the BJP candidates. The saffron party also received support from the Suheldev Bhartiya Samaj Party, RLD, the lone BSP MLA and one of the two Congress legislators. 

Earlier, the SP chief whip in the assembly Manoj Pandey resigned from his post and declared his support for the BJP. The other SP legislators, who voted for the BJP nominees, included Rakesh Pandey, Abhay Singh, Vinod Chaturvedi, Pooja Pal, Rakesh Pratap Singh and Ashutosh Maurya.

SP president Akhilesh Yadav said that the MLAs who had cross voted must have been promised "something" by the BJP. He said that the party had fielded the third candidate to "identify the 'traitors". ''Now everything has become clear,'' he added.

SP general secretary Shivpal Singh Yadav dubbed the defecting MLAs as ''haunted spirits'', whose fate would be decided by the people of their constituencies. ''BJP bought our MLAs,'' Shivpal alleged.