Bhubaneswar, Jun 3 (PTI) The ruling BJD in Odisha Friday pulled off a double victory winning all the three Rajya Sabha seats unopposed and the by-poll to the Brajrajnagar assembly seat in Jharsuguda district by a huge margin.
The three BJD candidates who made it to the Rajya Sabha are Sulata Deo, Manas Ranjan Mangaraj and Sasmit Patra.
Patra was re-nominated to the Rajya Sabha.
The three were elected unopposed as neither the opposition BJP nor Congress fielded any candidate due to lack of numbers in the Assembly.
The three seats will fall vacant on July 1 when the tenure of N Bhaskar Rao, Prasanna Acharya and Sasmit Patra’s tenure in the Rajya Sabha ends.
While Patra has been elected twice in a row, Deo and Mangaraj are first timers.
They were awarded the certificate of election by the returning officer here in the Assembly premises. They thanked Chief Minister and BJD president Naveen Patnaik and said that Odisha’s concerns will be rightfully placed in the Parliament.
The election was slated to take place on June 10 but as no other candidates filed their nomination, the trio were elected unopposed.
The BJD has 113 MLAs in the 147-member assembly while the opposition BJP and Congress have 22 and nine legislators respectively.
Earlier in the day, BJD candidate Alaka Mohanty won a landslide victory in the Brajrajnagar by-election. She defeated her nearest opponent Congress veteran Kishore Patel by a margin of above 66,000 votes.
BJP was pushed to the third place for the first time since the 2019 general and state polls and its candidate Radharani Panda lost her deposit, the Election Commission said.
Mohanty won the seat riding the crest of the sympathy wave due to the unitimely death of her husband Brajrajnagar MLA Kishore Mohanty and the popularity of Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik, who is a five term chief minister.
The Brajrajnagar by-poll margin is the highest in all the by-polls held in Odisha since 2019.
Another Rajya Sabha seat in the state has remained vacant after the resignation of Subhas Singh, who has been elected as the Mayor of Cuttack Municipal Corporation.
The by-election to the seat, for which BJD has fielded tribal leader Niranjan Bishi, will be held on June 13 and the counting will be held after the poll, an official said.PTI AAM KK KK KK
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