The Election Commission on Tuesday announced elections for 12 Rajya Sabha seats across Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, and West Bengal, to be held on October 16.
The polls will be held for 10 seats from Uttar Pradesh and one from Uttarakhand, where the terms of the sitting members in the Upper House end on November 25. The notification for these polls will be issued on September 29, and nominations can be filed till October 6. The Bahujan Samaj Party is set to lose its sole Rajya Sabha seat as Ramji Gautam completes his term, leaving the party without any representation in Parliament for the first time since its debut victory in a Lok Sabha seat in 1989.
A bypoll will be held for one Rajya Sabha seat from West Bengal. Others retiring from Uttar Pradesh include Bharatiya Janata Party leaders Arun Singh, Geeta Shakya, Neeraj Shekhar, Brijlal, B.L. Verma, Seema Dwivedi, and Hardeep Singh Puri, and Samajwadi Party leader Ram Gopal Yadav. The seat vacated by former U.P. Deputy Chief Minister Dinesh Sharma, who was appointed as Lieutenant Governor of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, will also go to the polls. The Rajya Sabha elections come ahead of the Uttar Pradesh Assembly polls due next year. These elections will likely result in only minor changes in the party composition of the Rajya Sabha, with only the BJP set to gain one seat with a win in West Bengal at the cost of the Mamata All India Trinamool Congress. The BJP is also comfortably placed to retain the Uttarakhand seat.
