New Delhi. NDA candidate Jagdeep Dhankhar has been elected as the new Vice President of the country. In Saturday’s election, he defeated the opposition’s joint candidate Margaret Alva by a huge margin. In the election of the Vice-President, 725 MPs out of 780 members of both houses of Parliament cast their votes, out of which the votes of 15 MPs became invalid. Out of total 710 valid votes, Dhankhar got 528 and Alva got 182 votes. In this way, Dhankhar defeated the common candidate of the opposition by a huge margin of 346 votes and was elected the 14th Vice President of the country.
Dhankhar, 71, who hails from Rajasthan, is currently the Governor of West Bengal. Now he will resign from the post of Governor and will take oath as the 14th Vice President of the country on August 11. Coming from the OBC community, he is the first Vice President of the country and the second Vice President who was born after independence. Jagdeep Dhankhar with a socialist background was a minister in the central government in the nineties.
Voting for the Vice President’s post began on Saturday morning and counting of votes took place in the evening. After the results, Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Jagdeep Dhankhar’s residence and congratulated him. The equation was changed in the Vice Presidential election as compared to the Presidential election. In the presidential election, Trinamool Congress supported the joint opposition candidate Yashwant Sinha. But this time the Trinamool Congress stayed away from the election. Mamta Banerjee’s 34 MPs did not take part in the voting, due to which the vote count for Alva remained below 200. Mamta’s two MPs Shishir and Divyendu Adhikari voted for Jagdeep Dhankhar.
The two parties that supported the NDA candidate Draupadi Murmu in the presidential election – the Aam Aadmi Party and the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha – voted for the opposition candidate in the vice president’s election. Because of this, Jagdeep Dhankhar got less votes of MPs than Draupadi Murmu. A total of 55 MPs did not cast their votes in Saturday’s polling. In these, apart from 34 Trinamool MPs, two each from BJP, SP and Shiv Sena and one BSP MP did not vote.
However, senior leaders of all parties cast their votes in the Parliament House vote on Saturday. Apart from Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union ministers Rajnath Singh, Amit Shah and party’s national president JP Nadda cast their votes. Two Congress MPs did not take part in the voting. Congress President Sonia Gandhi and former President Rahul Gandhi took part in the voting along with Congress MPs. Former Prime Minister and senior Congress leader Manmohan Singh also voted on a wheel chair.
