New Delhi: It was a draw of lots that sealed the fate of senior Congress leader Abhishek Manu Singhvi, the party’s Rajya Sabha candidate from Himachal Pradesh, Tuesday night.
Singhvi lost to BJP’s Harsh Mahajan despite both of them getting equal number of votes, 34, for the sole Rajya Sabha seat, the election for which was held Tuesday. What decided Mahajan’s win was the decision of the returning officer, who was the chief electoral officer of the state, to hold a draw of lot as per Rule 75 of the Conduct of Election Rules, 1961.
Rule 75 deals with counting of votes where only one seat is to be filled. Subsection 4 of the rule states that if two or more candidates have got equal number of votes, which is credited the same value, then the “returning officer shall decide by lot which of them shall be excluded.”
This is what happened in Himachal Pradesh.
With both Mahajan and Singhvi getting 34 votes each, chief electoral officer Maneesh Garg, who was the returning officer, decided to hold a draw of lots. The names of both Singhvi and Mahajan were written in two separate slips and put in a box in front of polling agents and the candidates.
From the box, one slip was taken out, which had Singhvi’s name. “Singhvi was excluded while Mahajan was declared the winner,” a source in the Himachal Pradesh government said.
The ruling Congress has a clear majority with 40 members in the 68-member assembly in Himachal Pradesh. The BJP has 25 MLAs. But despite the number stacked against the BJP, Mahajan managed to get 34 votes after six Congress MLAs and three Independents cross voted in his favour, handing a humiliating defeat to Singhvi.
Former Lok Sabha secretary general P.D.T. Achary said that though “ünscientific” but in case of a tie, winning candidates are decided by draw of lots, not only in India but globally.
“The draw of lots is an arbitrary, unscientific process but what do you do? The law prescribes that this is how you have to pick the winning candidate in case of a tie,” he told ThePrint.
He added that the process is the same for deciding the winning candidate in case of the Lok sabha elections if the first two candidates have polled equal number of votes. “In Lok Sabha elections it happens rarely though.”
There has been some precedent in the past where the winning candidate was decided through a draw of lots or a toss of a coin.
In the Assam panchayat elections in December 2018, at least six candidates in the Barak Valley, who secured the same number of votes as the other candidate, were declared winners by a toss of coin.
In 2017, BJP’s Meena Agarwal was chosen the winner in the Mathura Vrindavan Municipal Corporation election through a draw of lottery when both she and the Congress candidate secured 874 votes each.
(Edited by Tony Rai)
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