HAMID ANSARI
RE-ELECTED VICE-PRESIDENT
UPA
candidate Hamid Ansari was today re-elected as the Vice-President, becoming the
second person to get the second consecutive term as he defeated NDA nominee
Jaswant Singh by a large margin of 252 votes.75-year-old Ansari, a former IFS
officer, got 490 votes against 238 bagged by Mr Singh out of 736 votes polled
earlier in the day,7th August,2012.Altogether 787 Members of Rajya
Sabha and Lok Sabha were eligible to vote but 47 MPs did not cast their votes,
who include ailing Union Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh who has been admitted in a
Chennai Hospital.Eight votes were invalid, according to T K Vishwanathan, Lok
Sabha Secretary General and Returning Officer for the Vice-Presidential poll.Mr
Ansari is the second Vice-President to be re-elected after S Radhakrishnan who
was the first to get two terms from 1952 to 1962.
An
affable and well-read person, Mr Ansari was the second choice of Congress
president Sonia Gandhi for the President’s post and lost out to Pranab
Mukherjee due to some brinkmanship by TMC leader Mamata Banerjee and Samajwadi
Party leader Mulayam Singh Yadav.Formerly the Vice-Chancellor of Aligarh Muslim
University, Mr Ansari’s name came as a surprise in 2007 election when the Left
parties, supporting the UPA-I from outside, proposed him and the Congress-led
alliance accepted it.The Left parties, which faced divisions on the
Presidential poll, however, had no problems in supporting Mr Ansari for a
second time.
Prof.
John Kurakar
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