The Rajya Sabha elections to seven seats in Maharashtra are likely to be uncontested, as there are exactly seven candidates in the fray for them.
The BJP's candidates include Ramdas Athavale, party general secretary Vinod Tawde, Maya Ivnate, and Ramrao Vadkute. The Shinde Shiv Sena's candidate is its firebrand speaker, Dr Jyoti Waghmare. The Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) candidate is Parth Pawar (son of the late Ajit Pawar), while the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) has supported the candidature of Sharad Pawar.
All three parties in the MVA had staked claim to one Rajya Sabha seat. However, the Shiv Sena (UBT) had said that as it had the largest number of MLAs, due to which the seat belonged to them.
Congress also had staked a claim for the seat, while the NCP (SP) wanted the seat for Sharad Pawar, as he was among those whose seats had become vacant.
Notably, the MVA cannot get more than one seat in the Rajya Sabha, as they have just 46 legislators. The quota needed to get elected is 37 first-preference votes.
It is reliably learnt that Supriya Sule had a talk with Uddhav Thackeray and Rahul Gandhi in order to secure support for Sharad Pawar's candidature.
However, Uddhav Thackeray is said to have put forth a condition—that the NCP's Sharad Pawar would not join hands with the BJP in case of a merger between the two factions.
As a result, senior NCP (SP) leader Jayant Patil made a statement that a merger was out of the question, as Ajit Pawar had initiated the merger talks, and since he was no more, there would also be no more talk of a merger.