Jaipur: The election commission has announced polls for 58 Rajya Sabha seats from 16 states, including three from Rajasthan. Polling for these seats, which will fall vacant in April this year, will be held on March 23. The counting of votes will take place on the same day.State’s chief electoral officer Ashwini Bhagat said the poll process would begin from March 5 with the issuing of election notification. The last day for filing nominations is March 12. Nominations would be scrutinised on March 13, while candidates would be able to withdraw nominations by March 15.Polling will be held in the state assembly from 9am to 4pm on March 23 and the counting of votes would begin there soon after from 5pm. The entire election process is to be completed by March 26.The three Upper House seats that will fall vacant in April here include that of Abhishek Manu Singhvi and Narendra Budania of Congress and Bhupendra Yadav of BJP. Their terms are ending on April 3.The ruling BJP is likely to win all three seats from Rajasthan on the strength of its 159 members in the 200-member state assembly. The ruling party currently has eight out of 10 Rajya Sabha seats under its fold.The ruling party had earlier hoped of having a clean sweep on the parliamentary seats of both Houses from the state, as it had captured all 25 Lok Sabha seats from here in the 2014 general elections. In the recently held bypolls, however, it lost the two Lok Sabha seats of Ajmer and Alwar to the Congress.After displacing Congress from four Rajya Sabha seats in the state last year, the ruling party had claimed it would soon make Rajasthan “Congress Mukt”, at least in terms of parliamentary seats from here. The humiliating defeat of BJP in the bypolls that concluded on February 1 dashed the party’s hopes of a ‘Congress Mukt Rajasthan’.

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