- The ruling NDA is ready with an elaborate plan for the election of the Vice President today
- The MPs have been divided up and each group will be under the stern eye of a minister till the voting begins
- The margin of the victory is not expected to be large, and the NDA is tracking every vote, sources said
The ruling NDA is ready with an elaborate plan for the election of the Vice President today -- contest between NDA candidate Maharashtra Governor CP Radhakrishnan and Opposition's retired Supreme Court judge Justice Sudershan Reddy. Though the numbers are stacked up in favour of the ruling NDA, the ruling alliance has come up with a detailed plan to ensure there are no slips. The margin of the victory is not expected to be large, and the NDA is tracking every vote, sources said.
The MPs have been divided up and each group will be under the stern eye of a minister till the voting begins. The groups will meet in the morning for breakfast and then head for parliament together, sources said.
All Members of Parliament from Uttar Pradesh will gather at Piyush Goyal's residence at 8 am. MPs from the rest of north India - Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab, Haryana, Himachal and Uttarakhand will gather at the residence of Manohar Lal Khattar.
Members of Parliament from south India will gather at the residence of Prahlad Joshi. Shivraj Singh Chouhan will be in charge of members of Parliament from Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh.
MPs from Rajasthan will gather at the residence of Arjun Meghwal, those from Gujarat at the residence of Mansukh Mandaviya, those from Bihar and Jharkhand at the residence of Nityanand Rai.
Maharashtra MPs will start from the residence of Bhupendra Yadav, Bengal and Odisha MPs from the residence of Dharmendra Pradhan and those from northeast at the residence of Kiren Rijiju.
The Vice-President is picked through secret ballot and the MPs are allowed to exercise their choice. But in practice, MPs mostly vote as per the unofficial party line. Cross-voting is not uncommon and happened during when Jagdeep Dhankhar was elected in 2022. Some expect a repetition this time as well.
At present there are 239 Rajya Sabha MPs and 542 Lok Sabha MPs, all of whom are eligible to vote. But with the decision of Naveen Patnaik's Biju Janata Dal and K Chandrashekar Rao's Bharat Rashtra Samithi to abstain, the total number of MPs voting comes down to 770 and the majority mark is 386. The NDA has 427 MPs.
