BHUBANESWAR: All the three Biju Janata Dal (BJD) candidates, Soumya Ranjan Patnaik, Achyuta Samanta and Prashant Nanda were today declared elected to the Rajya Sabha from Odisha unopposed.
Returning Officer Rajesh Prabhakar Patil announced the names of the elected persons after the deadline for withdrawal of nominations ended this afternoon. Scrutiny of the nomination papers were held on
March 13 in which the papers filed by independent candidate Subhas Mohapatra were found to be invalid as he had no proposers.
Opposition political parties, Congress and BJP, had not fielded any candidate due to their inadequate numbers in the state assembly. While the BJD has 118 MLAs in the 147-member assembly, the Congress
and the BJP have 15 and 10 legislators respectively. As a candidate requires at least 37 first preference votes to get elected to the Rajya Sabha from the state, the opposition parties had not fielded any nominee.
Three Rajya Sabha seats from Odisha will fall vacant as the tenures of BJD MPs Dilip Tirkey, AU Singhdeo and BJD backed independent member AV Swamy will come to an end on April 2. Nanda and
Patnaik received the certificates from the returning officer today after they were declared elected. Samanta, who was not in the city, would get his certificate of election later.
Patnaik and Samanta were fielded by BJD as candidates for Rajya Sabha polls hours after they joined the regional outfit on March 7. Patnaik told mediapersons that he will raise issues related to Odisha's interest in the Rajya Sabha and continue to fight for the cause of farmers, language and prohibition of liquor.
“I will work as per the instructions of the party and will raise issues related to Odisha in the Rajya
Sabha,' Nanda said.