The Election Commission (EC) on Thursday announced that by-elections to two Rajya Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh and Kerala will be held on August 24. These seats fell vacant due to the demise of the members.
“The Commission has decided to hold by-elections to the Council of States from Uttar Pradesh and Kerala to fill up the vacancies,” the EC said. The EC has also decided to conduct a bypoll for only one of two vacancies in the Andhra Pradesh Legislative Council under the MLAs quota on August 24.
The seats were left vacant due to the deaths of Samajwadi Party MP Beni Prasad Verma from Uttar Pradesh and LDF backed Independent MP, M P Veerendra Kumar from Kerala on 27 March and 28 May, respectively. Verma’s term was upto 7 April, 2022 while Kumar’s tenure was upto 2 April, 2022.
As per schedule, the EC has planned to complete the election process in both the states before 26 August.
The commission has also directed the chief secretaries concerned to depute a senior officer from the state to ensure that the extant instructions regarding COVID-19 containment measures are complied with while making arrangements for conducting the elections.
Declaring the bypolls in the two seats, the EC said the notification for the elections will be issued on 6 August. The last date for filing nomination for the elections is 13 August. The scrutiny of nomination will be held on 14 August and the deadline for withdrawal of nomination is 17 August. Voting will take place betwe on 24 August and the counting of votes will be completed on 24 August.
PPE suits and ambulances were part of EC’s guidelines for conducting the elections to the 24 vacant Rajya Sabha seats across eight states in June, which was the first major
voting exercise since the pandemic prompted sweeping measures in March to ensure social distancing to check its spread. The polls were earlier scheduled for March.
Verma, a founding member of the Samajwadi Party and former Union minister who was considered close to party patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav, died 27 March at the age of 79. Verma was the telecom minister from 1996 to 1998 in then Prime Minister H D Deve Gowda’s cabinet and was the steel minister in the Congress-led UPA Government.
