NEW DELHI, 27 June 2004 — All 11 candidates for the Rajya Sabha from Uttar Pradesh were yesterday elected unopposed. They include Reliance Group CEO Anil Ambani, Lalit Suri and Jaya Bachchan, the wife of Bollywood actor Amitabh Bachchan.
The others were former ministers Arun Shourie and Murli Manohar Joshi (both BJP), Bahujan Samaj Party leader Mayawati, Satish C. Mishra (BSP), Bhagwati Singh, Ram Narayan Sahu, Nand Kishore and Kamal Akhtar (all Samajwadi Party).
Ambani stood as an independent supported by the SP and Suri as an independent supported by the Bharatiya Janata Party. Jaya Bachchan stood as an SP candidate.
The results were announced by the returning officer, R.P. Pandey, yesterday under a revised schedule announced by the Election Commission earlier this week, when it asked the returning officer to re-examine the papers of two Congress nominees.
After hearing arguments for two days, the returning officer on Friday rejected the nomination papers of two Congress nominees, M.M. Shukla and Harendra Aggarwal, sticking to his earlier decision that their papers were “invalid”. Congress criticized the decision and appealed to the Election Commission to hold off announcing the results.
But Friday’s decision paved the way for the unopposed election of the 11 candidates.
Meanwhile, the election of BJP’s Dushyant Singh, the son of Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje, to the Lok Sabha from the state’s Jhalawar constituency has been challenged in the Rajasthan High Court on the grounds that official machinery was allegedly misused in his favor.
Congress candidate Sanjay Gurjar, who lost to Dushyant, filed a petition in the High Court alleging misuse of official machinery at the direction of the chief minister. The court is likely to take up the petition next month after its summer break, Gurjar’s counsel Lokesh Sharma said.
