Gujarat BJP Rajya Sabha nominees declared elected unopposed in dullest election in recent time

With only 17 seats, Congress didn't field any candidate.

Powered by the party's historic majority of 156 seats in the House of 182, the three ruling BJP candidates Monday were declared elected unopposed which left their election to Rajya Sabha (RS) a mere formality. The state BJP was quick to send congratulatory messages to its candidates.

All three candidates, including external affairs minister S Jaishankar, former BJP MLA Babu Desai and ex-royal family scion Kesridevsinh Zala, were declared elected unopposed. They had filed their nominations last week and their election was a mere formality with the chief opposition Congress staying away from it.

With only 17 seats, a historic low, Congress didn't field any candidate, making it the dullest RS election in the past six years, at least. In 2017, the election to the seats of upper house of the Parliament was one of the biggest political showdowns in the state between BJP and Congress.

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The BJP's then national president Amit Shah and Union minister Smriti Irani had won two of the three seats, while the party used every trick in the book to clinch the third one on which the party had pitted Congress turncoat Balwantsinh Rajput, who is now a minister in the state, against senior Congress leader Ahmed Patel. Days before the polls, Congress was forced to herd its MLAs to resorts including in Bengaluru after suffering desertions.

Senior Congress leader Patel had won the third seat in the battle of wits after two crucial votes of his rebel MLAs went in favour of BJP but the election commission termed their ballots invalid. The victory was said to be a moral booster for the Congress which came close to defeating BJP for the first time by reducing the latter to 99 seats. However, the house of Congress started crumbling afterwards.

The party legislators kept switching over to the BJP in the subsequent elections. In 2019, party's popular OBC face Alpesh Thakor had quit during the Rajya Sabha elections, while in 2020, Brijesh Merja from Morbi, Akshay Patel from Karjan and Jitu Chaudhary from Kaprada resigned.

Congress was forced to move its MLAs to Jaipur earlier in the same year after five of its MLAs resigned. The Congress was expected to win two seats but due to mass resignation, only Shaktisinh Gohil could make it. Gohil was recently appointed as president of Gujarat Congress. By 2022 Assembly elections, the chief opposition party had lost over a dozen MLAs to the BJP.