Guwahati, Aug 26 (IANS): Two Assam BJP candidates were elected unopposed to Rajya Sabha on Monday as the opposition refrained from fielding candidates against two vacant berths in the upper house.
The ruling party fielded former Union Minister Rameswar Teli and former MLA Mission Ranjan Das in the two vacant seats of Rajya Sabha last week. Since there were no candidates from the opposition camp, both Teli and Das were declared elected to the Rajya Sabha unopposed by the state election officials.
The two BJP nominees collected their certificate of winning the election unopposed. The seats fell vacant after Sarbananda Sonowal and Kamakhya Prasad Tasa fought the Lok Sabha elections and became MPs in the lower house of the parliament.
Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma took to X handle and congratulated both the candidates.
“Congratulations to @BJP4Assam candidates, Shri Mission Ranjan Das and Shri @Rameswar_Teli on being elected unopposed to the Rajya Sabha from Assam. My gratitude to our legislators and valued NDA partners for their unequivocal support to their candidature,” the Chief Minister said.
“I am confident that both the veteran leaders will represent the aspirations of the tea tribes community and Barak Valley with renewed vigour in the Upper House,” he added.
Sonowal won the Dibrugarh Lok Sabha seat and Tasa defeated the Congress candidate Roselina Tirkey in the newly formed Kaziranga parliamentary constituency.
In the delimitation exercise, the Kaliabor constituency was scrapped by the Election Commission and a Kaziranga Lok Sabha seat was introduced. This forced Congress leader Gaurav Gogoi to shift to the Jorhat parliamentary constituency.
Teli represented the Dibrugarh Lok Sabha seat twice in the parliament; however, he was dropped after Sonowal was projected as a BJP candidate in Dibrugarh. It was common apprehension that Teli would be given Sonowal’s vacant seat in the Rajya Sabha.
Mission Ranjan Das is a Hindu Bengali leader and an old loyalist of the BJP. Das was elected to the state assembly four times and he was one of the few leaders who reaped the seeds of the BJP in Assam when the party was a non-entity in the state.
Notably, Das earlier also sought a ticket for Rajya Sabha but he was denied. This time, the BJP leadership decided to nominate a leader from the Hindu Bengali community of the state which has always been a stronghold of the ruling party.