On the last day of withdrawal of nomination papers on Monday, all 13 candidates were declared elected unopposed to the UP Legislative Council by Returning Officer Brij Bhushan Dube.
All the winners were given election certificates by the returning officer.
There were only 13 vacancies and the same number of candidates had filed the nomination papers.
Those elected include nine of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and the rest of the Samajwadi Party.
Of the nine BJP candidates elected to the legislative council, seven are ministers. They are Deputy Chief Minister Keshav Prasad Maurya, Bhupendra Singh Chaudhary, Dayashankar Mishra ‘Dayalu’, JPS Rathor, Narendra Kumar Kashyap, Jaswant Saini, Danish Azad Ansari. The other two are Banwari Lal Dohre and Mukesh Sharma.
The SP candidates elected to the legislative council are Swami Prasad Maurya, Mukul Yadav, Shahnawaz Khan and Jasmir Ansari.
The tenures of Keshav Prasad Maurya and Panchayati Raj Minister Bhupendra Singh Chaudhary as members of the legislative council will end on July 6.
Keshav Prasad Maurya had contested the 2022 assembly polls from Sirathu assembly constituency in Kaushambi but he lost to Samajwadi Party’s Pallavi Patel.
Minister of State for Cooperation JPS Rathore, Minister of State for Backward Classes Welfare Narendra Kashyap, Minister of State for AYUSH Dayashankar Mishra Dayalu, Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs and Industrial Development Jaswant Saini and Minister of State for Minority Welfare Danish Azad Ansari are not members of either House of UP legislature. Mukesh Sharma is a senior office-bearer of the BJP.
Swami Prasad Maurya is a former minister of the Yogi Adityanath government and had quit the BJP ahead of the UP assembly elections in January this year. He had contested the recent assembly election from Fazilnagar but was trounced.
Jasmir Ansari had joined the SP after leaving the Congress. Mukul Yadav is the son of former SP MLA Sobaran Singh Yadav who vacated his Karhal seat for Akhilesh Yadav in the assembly polls and Sahnawaz Khan is said to be close to senior SP leader Mohammed Azam Khan.
The Congress will cease to exist in the UP Legislative council as its sole member will retire on July 6. As the Congress has only two MLAs, it had not contested the council elections. The upper House of UP will become Congress-free after Deepak Singh retires.