Gandhinagar: The voting for the crucial Rajyasabha elections on three seats of Gujarat would be held from 9am to 4pm tomorrow.

The counting will also be held tomorrow from 5 pm, an hour after the end of polling.

The polling station for the election, which incidentally was first such poll to take place after 1996 (not needed earlier owing to consensus), has been made in Swarnim Sankul 2, the premises of the seat of the government here.

Gujarat Assembly Secretary D M Patel, who is also the returning officer for the Rajyasabha election said that after the resignation of six Congress MLA’s, there were a total of 176 voters (MLA’s) for the polls.

The election has been necessitated owing to the nearing of the completion of the tenures of three existing members union minister Smriti Irani and Dilip Pandya(both BJP) and Ahmed Patel (Congress).

Meanwhile the win of two of the 3 BJP candidates party president Amit Shah and Mrs Irani was almost certain while the fate of the third party candidate Balwantsinh Rajput who joined BJP after resigning from Congress was hanging in balance along with the sole Congress candidate Ahmed Patel, the political secretary of Sonia Gandhi despite Congress’ claim of having enough numbers. He needs the support of 45 MLA’s for getting a fifth time entry in to the upper house. In 182 member assembly, BJP has 122 seat including dissident Kotadiya , Congress 51 (along with 7 of Vaghela camp) and NCP 2 and JD U 1. JDU is also quite unpredicatable while NCP MLA Kandhal Jadeja has today evening told media persons that high command has formally asked to vote for BJP.

The NOTA option has made the election scenario even more interesting with all kind of speculations and in the ‘war like situation’ for every single first preference vote matters. The cross voting in presidential election recently has also kept many fingers crossed to see whether such thing will also happen in Rajyasabha election.

Congress and BJP both have issued whips for the election. The 44 Congress MLA’s now flocked at a farmhouse in central Gujarat after their arrival to Gujarat this morning from Bengaluru where they were in another resort for 9 days, would be brought for voting in a bus here.

Though there will be tight security arrangements for the polls yet the possibility of some unruly scene can’t be ruled out.

BJP has claimed victory on all three seats while Patel has also expressed confidence of his fifth consecutive entry to the upper house with a convincing win.

The brief 2 day monsoon session of Gujarat Assembly will also start tomorrow in Mahatma Mandir here and it would be for the first time that any session would be held outside the current assembly building which came in to existence in 1982 owing to ongoing maintenance work.

A senior Congress leader said that the 44 MLA’s of the party would first come to vote together and then move to Mahatma Mandir for the assembly session.
Meanwhile both BJP and Congress were holding closed doors parleys to finalize their last minute polls strategies. Shah himself chaired a meeting of BJP MLA’s today in which the other two candidates of the party and Gujarat in-charge Bhupendra Yadav, CM Vijay Rupani, Dy CM Nitin Patel were present. Several rounds of small meetings of the senior party leaders of both the parties were held.

DeshGujarat