TRS bags all 3 Rajya Sabha seats

​Hyderabad: As expected, the ruling Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) won all the three Rajya Sabha seats with its candidates securing more votes than required.

The polling was held on Friday for three Rajya Sabha seats from Telangana, on the premises of Assembly. The votes were counted, and results were declared later in the evening. The TRS candidates secured 97 votes, with Banda Prakash cornering 33 votes, J Santosh Kumar 32 and B Lingaiah Yadav 32. Congress candidate P Balaram Naik ended up as the loser with just 10 votes in his kitty. 

Polling for Rajya Sabha seats began at 9am and 108 MLAs cast their votes. The strength of the Assembly is 117 and of them five BJP, three Telugu Desam and one CPM MLA abstained from voting. 

In another development, the vote of independent member D Madhava Reddy was rejected due to violation of the rules.  The ruling party legislators arrived in a bus in the morning and cast their votes. 

Irrigation Minister T Harish Rao voted first and Congress legislator T Jeavan Reddy was the last one to vote. Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao cast his vote in the afternoon. 

The Congress issued whip to its MLAs, including to its seven defected MLAs, to cast their votes in favour of the party nominee. However, the defected legislators cast their vote in favour of the ruling party defying the whip. All the other 10 MLAs of the Congress voted in favour of their candidate. 

Independent MLA Madhava Reddy too voted for the Congress. However, the TRS lodged a complaint against his vote as he has shown the ballot to the polling agent of the Congress. 

The returning officer of the elections has referred the matter to the Election Commission of India and the EC directed the RO to reject the vote. 

The polling went on as planned by the TRS. The ruling party poll managers have allotted first preference votes to the three candidates. Along with 85 TRS MLAs, seven MLAs of Majlis, one CPI MLA, and four other MLAs have voted in favour of three candidates of the ruling party. 

The TRS candidates have got five to six votes more than the required votes of 27. They were declared elected after the counting of the first preference votes.