One MP each from Mizoram, Meghalaya, Manipur and Arunachal Pradesh will be elected to the Rajya Sabha in 2020 as 69 members of the Upper House are set to retire.
Among the members slated to retire, 18 are from the BJP and 17 from the Congress.
“Four seats are already lying vacant in the Upper House and 69 members are slated to retire in the year. This takes the total vacant seats in the Upper House to 73,” Rajya Sabha Secretariat data stated.
Mukut Mithi (Arunachal Pradesh), K Bhabananda Singh (Manipur), Wansuk Syiem (Meghalaya), and Ronald Sapa Tlau (Mizoram) will retire in 2020 and they will make way for some new faces from the respective states.
In the 250-member house, the BJP has 83 members and the Congress has 46 members and the maximum number of MPs are retiring from Uttar Pradesh, followed by seven from Maharashtra, six from Tamil Nadu, five each from West Bengal and Bihar.
Apart from these states, four seats each will be vacant from Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Karnataka and Odisha; three seats each will be vacant in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, two each in Telangana, Haryana, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh and one seat each will be vacant in Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh.
The BJP, which is marching towards the majority mark in the Upper House, however, is unlikely to make substantial gain due to its string of defeats in the Lok Sabha polls in 2018 and 2019.
Only Uttar Pradesh, where 10 seats are getting vacant, is likely to be some help for the BJP as the party has its government in the state.
However, BJP’s loss in the Lok Sabha polls in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Jharkhand is likely to favour the Congress in the Raja Sabha.