Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha MPs will vote to choose the new Vice President on Saturday with NDA nominee Jagdeep Dhankar all set to romp home comfortably with the numbers in the electoral college overwhelmingly in his favour against joint Opposition candidate Margaret Alva.
With eight vacancies in Rajya Sabha, a total of 780 MPs -- 543 in Lok Sabha and 237 in Rajya Sabha -- are eligible to vote to choose M Venkaiah Naidu’s successor, who will also be the Chairman of Rajya Sabha. The voting will end at 5 pm and soon after, the counting will start.
Dhankar, who quit as West Bengal Governor before filing the nominations, is likely to get 518 to 539 votes while his opponent may get 189 votes as Trinamool Congress with 36 MPs announced that it will abstain from voting after complaining that there was no proper consultation within the anti-BJP grouping on finalising the nominee.
Besides the NDA allies, parties like BJD, BSP, YSR Congress and TDP have pledged support to Dhankar while non-UPA parties like AAP have announced support for Alva. JMM, which broke ranks with the Opposition to vote for NDA nominee Droupadi Murmu in the Presidential elections, has also pledged support for Alva.
A former Union Minister in Chandrasekhar government in 1990, Dhankar joined the BJP after stints in Congress and Janata Dal. He is a controversial figure in recent times after his run-ins with West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.
Mamata’s decision to abstain from voting has exposed the fault lines in the Opposition, which has been trying to pitch the election as an ideological fight against the BJP-RSS. While Trinamool Congress claimed that there was no consultation, Congress sources said Sonia Gandhi spoke to Mamata at least twice on the polls.
Mamata also refused to come on line when Opposition leaders called her to discuss the candidate.
Alva has urged MPs to consider the Vice Presidential election as a referendum on how the Parliament is being run and the breakdown in the fundamental democratic process of building consensus on important national issues.
In letters to MPs, Alva said "the time for change is now" and the reason the election to the Vice President's post is not subject to a party whip and is by secret ballot is to give members an opportunity to vote without fear for a candidate they believe will do justice to this critical position.