NEW DELHI: NDA candidate Jagdeep Dhankhar was on Saturday elected India’s 14th Vice-President, defeating the joint Opposition candidate Margaret Alva by 346 votes. Dhankhar, former West Bengal governor, got an overwhelming 528 votes against Alva’s 182.
At the end of the counting of votes, an exercise which took about two hours, Lok Sabha general secretary Utpal K Singh said 725, or 92.4%, of the total 780 MPs cast their ballots. As many as 15 votes were found to be invalid.
Soon after Dhankhar was declared the winner, Prime Minister Narendra Modi met him to personally congratulate him. Home Minister Amit Shah also congratulated Dhankhar.
The term of outgoing VP M Venkaiah Naidu ends on August 10. Dhankhar’s victory comes close on the heels of the presidential election, in which the NDA candidate Droupadi Murmu pipped the Opposition’s joint nominee Yashwant Sinha.
The vice-president, the second highest constitutional post in the country, is elected indirectly by an electoral college comprising Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha MPs, including nominated members. The voting is by secret ballot and the process involves a system of proportional representation using the single transferable vote.
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Dhankhar, the first ever Jat to occupy the second highest constitutional position, will also assume the office of Rajya Sabha vice-chairman. Born at Kithana in Rajasthan’s Jhunjhunu district, Dhankhar graduated in Physics and later Law before practising as a lawyer in the Rajasthan High Court and later in the Supreme Court.
He was elected to the Lower House of Parliament from Jhunjhunu in 1989 and was picked by the then PM Chandra Shekhar to his cabinet less than a year later. After the fall of the Chandra Shekhar government, Dhankhar moved back to his home state and was elected an MLA from Kishangarh in 1993. He joined the BJP in 2008.
His tenure as West Bengal governor was marked by frequent confrontations with the Trinamool Congress government led by Mamata Banerjee. While Dhankhar’s victory was a foregone conclusion, the TMC declared long before the election that it would abstain from voting.
However, two TMC MPs — Shishir Adhikari and Dibyendu Adhikari — broke the party line and voted. Soon after Dhankar’s candidature was announced by the Modi government last month, the Opposition parties decided to field former Rajasthan governor Margaret Alva.