Sanjay Lathar, the Leader of Opposition in the UP Legislative Council having the status of Cabinet Minister, will lose the office he holds by July 6 as the strength of the Opposition party will be below ten.

The strength of the UP Legislative Council, the Upper House of the UP Legislature, is 100 and for the status of Leader of Opposition, a party should have at least 10 per cent members.

After drawing a blank in the biennial election to 36 seats of UP Legislative Council from local body constituencies, the present strength of the Samajwadi Party in the Upper House has plummeted to 17.  Of the 17 members, 12 will retire in the next two months on different dates.

Two nominated members, Balwant Singh Ramuwalia and Wasim Barelvi, and Madhukar Jaitley will retire on April 28. On May 26, three more members, Rajpal Kashyap, Arvind Kumar and Arvind Lather, will retire.

On July 6, six more SP MLCs  — Jagjivan Prasad, Kamlesh Kumar Pathak, Ranvijay Singh, Shatrudh Prakash, Balram Yadav and Ram Sunder Das Nishad — will retire. Shatrudh Prakash has defected to the Bharatiya Janata Party.

After July 6, the effective strength of the SP will be reduced to five members -- Naresh Uttam, Rajendra Chaudhary, Ashutosh Sinha, Man Singh Yadav and Lalbihari Yadav.

Thirteen seats will fall vacant in UP Legislative Council in July and the biennial election for 13 council seats will be held in June. A candidate will need a minimum 31 first preference votes to win the election. The SP, with its strength of 125 in the UP assembly, can win a minimum of four seats.

Two more seats are vacant, one due to the death of leader of opposition in council Ahmed Hasan and Jaiveer Singh of the BJP who has been elected to UP assembly and is now a cabinet minister. In the by-election to two vacant seats, the BJP will win both as opposition parties lacking numbers never field a candidate.

After July 6, the strength of the Bahujan Samaj Party in the upper House will be reduced to one member like the UP assembly where it has only one MLA.