INDIA: Jagdeep Dhankhar, former Governor of Bengal, is the new Vice President of India. He beat the opposition Margaret Alva to become the winner.
The BJP-led NDA candidate won the election comfortably with 528 votes against Alva’s 182, polling was held earlier today. The number of votes needed to win was 372.
Out of 780 voters, 725 cast their vote with a voting percentage of 92.45%.The counting of votes for the vice-presidential election began at 6 p.m. after 92.4 percent of MPs had cast their votes.
Lok Sabha General Secretary Utpal K Singh said that out of 780 votes, 725 cast their votes and Dhankhar got 528 votes while Alva secured 182. There were 50 absentees and 15 votes were found invalid.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi is on his way to meet and congratulate Jagdeep Dhankar on his election as Vice President. Jagdeep Dhankhar, a Jat, was born in 1951 to a farmer’s family in Kithana, a small village in Rajasthan.
Dhankhar had the support of several other non-NDA parties like Naveen Patnaik’s Biju Janata Dal, Jaganmohan Reddy’s YSR Congress, Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party, Chandrababu Naidu’s Telugu Desam Party, Jharkhand Mukti Morcha, Akali Dal and the Eknath Shivde faction of the Sena.
The Telangana Rashtra Samithi, the Aam Aadmi Party and nine MPs from Uddhav Thackeray’s Shiv Sena faction supported Ms Alva. In the last election, opposition candidate Gopalkrishna Gandhi won 32 percent of the vote.
In a proportional representation system with one transferable vote, the voter must mark preferences against the names of the candidates.
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