At last the landslide victory for BJP in UP and Uttarakhand has taken the ruling alliance closer to getting the President of its choice. The present incumbent Pranab Mukherjee’s tenure ends in July. The emerging trend also indicates that there would be hardly any opposition to BJP’s choice of candidate and neither would there by other party fielding a candidate against it. So field is clear to have BJP monopoly. The NDA’s vote share in the electoral college is still short of majority, but gap can easily be narrowed. The President is elected by the members of an electoral college consisting of elected members of both the Houses of Parliament and the elected members of the legislative assemblies of states and the Union Territories of Delhi and Puducherry. The NDA was short of 75,076 (value of votes) from the majority mark in the electoral college (having value of votes of 10,98,882 in total) before the results of the five states – Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Punjab, Manipur and Goa, were declared. Though NDA, with a tally of 75, will continue to be a fair distance from the majority mark of 123 in the Rajya Sabha, Saturday’s victories will somewhat shorten the gap by next year. The result of other three states will also not alter the Upper House’s arithmetic in 2017. The NDA is, however, expected to boost its numbers next year when the Rajya Sabha will report a total of 68 vacancies. Fifty-eight out of the 68 vacancies will be reported in April, 2018. Ten vacancies will be reported from UP while one from Uttarakhand. The other states which will report vacancies next year include Delhi, Kerala, MP , Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Bihar, Gujarat, Telangana, Rajasthan, Odisha, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Haryana and Sikkim. Since the NDA has majority in Jharkhand, Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Gujarat and Haryana, the biennial election next year will help it in significantly improving its current numbers in the Upper House.
