CP Radhakrishnan was declared as elected the Vice President of India on Tuesday. Radhakrishnan won the vice presidential election by bagging 452 votes, while Opposition candidate B Sudershan Reddy polled 300 votes, according to Returning Officer PC Mody.
Radhakrishnan won the contest with a bigger than expected margin, indicating cross-voting from the rival camp. Announcing the result of the VP election, Rajya Sabha Secretary General and Returning Officer Mody said 767 MPs cast their votes in a turnout of 98.2 per cent. He said 752 ballots were valid and 15 were invalid, bringing down the required majority of first preference votes to 377.
“I declare CP Radhakrishnan elected to the post of Vice President of India and the results will be communicated to the election commission,” Mody said.
The poll was necessitated due to the resignation of Jagdeep Dhankhar on July 21, almost two years before his term was to end. The electoral college for the vice presidential election comprises a total of 788 members — 245 from the Rajya Sabha and 543 from the Lok Sabha. The present strength of the electoral college is 781 as six seats are vacant in the Rajya Sabha and one in the Lok Sabha.
President Droupadi Murmu, Prime Minister Narendra Modi congratulated Radhakrishnan, on being elected as VP.”Your decades of rich experience in public life will contribute significantly to the nation’s progress,” President Murmu said in a statement.
“Congratulations to Thiru CP Radhakrishnan Ji on winning the 2025 Vice Presidential election. His life has always been devoted to serving society and empowering the poor and marginalised,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi said.
Former VP Jagdeep Dhankhar too congratulated Radhakrishnan on being elected as next VP. “Strongly rooted in the RSS and the BJP, Radhakrishnan, brings along a rich political and administrative experience, which will prove handy in his role as the ex-officio chairperson of the Rajya Sabha,” said Dhankar who resigned abruptly in the midst of Monsoon Session that led to a massive political storm.
Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla, Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi, Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge and several Chief Ministers extended warm wishes to the new VP. Kharge while extending best wishes to Radhakrishnan also expressed sincere gratitude to Reddy for being the “united Opposition’s joint candidate” and for his spirited and principled fight.
Opposition’s VP candidate Reddy said he humbly accepts the defeat in and asserted that democracy is strengthened not by victory alone, but by the spirit of dialogue, dissent, and participation.
Hours before the result, senior Congress leader and Rajya Sabha MP Jairam Ramesh had claimed that the Opposition has stood united. “All of its 315 MPs have turned up for voting,” he said. The final tally in favour of Reddy, a retired Supreme Court judge, was 300, decidedly less than expected by the Opposition camp as some MPs unaligned to the two blocs had also announced their support to him.
BJP leaders were quick to claim that at least 15 opposition MPs voted in favour of Radhakrishnan. There were hints from the ruling alliance that some opposition MPs deliberately cast invalid votes.
A two-term member of the Lok Sabha from Coimbatore during the tenure of prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Radhakrishnan came close to becoming a Union minister, but had to lose out to fellow Tamilan Pon Radhakrishnan in 1998 after some confusion over his name by the then floor managers of the BJP.
Radhakrishnan joined the RSS as a teenager and rose through the ranks in the organisation and later in the BJP, gaining acceptability in the party and the state. A member of the socially dominant and economically prosperous Kongu Vellalar Gounder community, he became the secretary of the BJP’s Tamil Nadu unit in 1996 and served as the party’s State unit president between 2003 and 2006.
An avid sportsperson, Radhakrishnan was a college champion in table tennis and a long-distance runner. He also enjoys cricket and volleyball. Radhakrishnan is considered an untainted leader with rich political and administrative experience for the vice president’s office and this would also prove useful as the chairman of the Rajya Sabha.
The Tamil Nadu leader is said to be held in high esteem across party lines in his state, resulting in the BJP giving him multiple gubernatorial assignments in Jharkhand, Telangana, Maharashtra and Puducherry.