The Election Commission of India will conduct the election for the 14th Vice President of India on August 6 and announce the results the same day. The five-year tenure of the incumbent Vice President M. Venkaiah Naidu comes to an end on August 10.
Both the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and the Opposition have announced their candidates for the elections.
The Vice President of India, the second-highest constitutional post in the country, will be elected by an electoral college comprising members of the Rajya Sabha and the Lok Sabha.
Here is a look at the two candidates and their background.
Jagdeep Dhankhar
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance has chosen Jagdeep Dhankhar, who till recently served as the Governor of West Bengal, as its candidate for the Vice President elections. Dhankhar was born on May 18, 1951, in Rajasthan. He is a lawyer by profession and practiced law at the Rajasthan High Court and Supreme Court. Earlier, he served as the former president of Rajasthan High Court Bar Association. After a stint with the Janata Dal, Dhankhar joined the BJP in 2003 and was once the national convener for the party’s law and legal affairs department. In 2019, he was appointed the Governor of West Bengal.
Margaret Alva
The Opposition parties have jointly fielded former Union minister Margaret Alva as their candidate for the post. Alva comes from a Roman Catholic family in Mangalore. She was born in April 1942. Like rival Dhankhar, Alva is also a lawyer and practiced law before joining politics.
She was elected to the Rajya Sabha on a Congress ticket in 1974 at age 32. She held the post of MoS for Parliamentary Affairs, Youth and Sports and Women and Child Development. She later served as the Governor of Uttarakhand, Goa, and Gujarat before retiring as Governor of Rajasthan in 2014.
Other nominations
Apart from these two candidates, the office of the returning officer for the Vice President election had received nominations from five more persons. The five who filed their papers for the election are as follows:
K Padmarajan from Salem, Tamil Nadu
Pareshkumar Nanubhai Mulani from Ahmedabad, Gujarat
Hosmath Vijayanand from Bengaluru, Karnataka
Naidugari Rajasekhar Srimukhalingam from Andhra Pradesh
Anand Singh Khushwaha (alias ‘Ramayani Chaiwala’) from Gwalior, Madhya PradeshThe papers of Naidugari Rajasekhar Srimukhalingam were rejected on the first day itself on July 6.
The other four were rejected on scrutiny on July 20 as they were not supported by 20 parliamentarians as proposers and 20 others as seconders.
