Patna: The Election Commission on Friday formally declared RJD candidate Anil Jha as elected from the Darbhanga Graduates constituency of the Bihar Legislative Council, where protracted counting of votes had raised the hackles of the opposition party.
According to a statement issued by the EC, Jha secured 25,406 votes to wrest the seat from BJP MLC Sarvesh Kumar, who was the runner-up with a tally of 21,396 votes.
In the biennial polls held on October 23 for eight constituencies, the RJD, which held none of these, has thus improved its overall tally in the Upper House by wresting two seats from the BJP, barely a year after suffering a humiliating defeat in assembly elections.
Earlier, RJD candidate Sanjeev Kumar had been declared elected from Patna Teachers constituency, where he defeated five-term BJP MLC Nawal Kishor Yadav.
Counting of votes had begun on Tuesday morning for all the constituencies.
In Darbhanga Graduates seat, BJP supporters claimed a day later that the sitting MLC, whose tenure ends in November, has retained the seat.
However, as counting of votes continued on Thursday, RJD working president Tejashwi Yadav, who is also the leader of the opposition in the state assembly, raised an alarm.
In a post on X, the former deputy chief minister had accused the Election Commission of “foul play” and “trying to forcibly engineer a BJP victory,” where “10 per cent of votes were declared invalid” during the counting process that took more than “56 hours”.
By late Thursday evening, when the counting of votes was complete for the constituency, though results were not formally declared, celebrations erupted in the RJD camp and Yadav, too, extended greetings to Jha.
In the 75-strong legislative council, the BJP’s tally has now fallen to 24, though it remains the single largest party in the Upper House.
The party had contested four of the eight poll-bound seats, of which it held three. Though it lost Darbhanga Graduates and Patna Teachers, it wrested the Tirhut Teachers constituency, where BJP candidate Narendra Prasad Singh defeated CPI MLC Sanjay Kumar Singh.
BJP’s ally JD(U) retains the second spot in the Upper House, where it had 20 members.
JD(U) MLC retained Patna Graduates for the fourth consecutive term. The party failed to win any of the remaining three seats that it had contested.
The RJD remains the third largest party in the Vidhan Parishad, but with a slightly improved tally of 17, and Yadav has claimed that the results of the four Teachers and as many Graduates constituencies were “a mandate of the educated society against the NDA”.
