The ruling coalition in Maharashtra has numbers to win three out of six Rajya Sabha seats
The race for six Maharashtra seats in the Rajya Sabha elections goes down to the wire today with seven candidates for six seats and a majority still eluding rival candidates for the sixth seat.
The Uddhav Thackeray-led coalition of the Shiv Sena, Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and Congress is two votes down after two jailed MLAs, Anil Deshmukh and Nawab Malik, failed to get bail either from a lower court or from the Bombay High Court.
The High Court today refused to grant them immediate relief.
The intense prestige battle between Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray and his predecessor and BJP leader Devendra Fadnavis has set up a Rajya Sabha contest in the state for the first time in over two decades.
Both spent weeks reaching out to smaller parties and independent MLAs, whose votes have become crucial.
Any candidate needs 42 votes to win a Rajya Sabha seat.
The Shiv Sena has fielded two candidates, Sanjay Raut and Sanjay Pawar. The opposition BJP has put up three candidates - Union minister Piyush Goyal, Anil Bonde and Dhananjay Mahadik. The NCP and Congress have nominated one candidate each, Praful Patel and Imran Pratapgarhi.
"We have four candidates. The fight is on. We are confident of victory. It will be clear by 7 pm that all four of our candidates will win," said Shiv Sena leader Sanjay Raut.
The ruling coalition has the numbers to win three out of the six Rajya Sabha seats.
The BJP, which had 106 members in the assembly, can win two on its own but has fielded a third, setting up a contest for the sixth seat, between the BJP's Dhananjay Mahadik and the Shiv Sena's Sanjay Pawar.
At it stands, the BJP and its allies have 29 votes.
Maharashtra BJP leader Pravin Darekar said, "The BJP candidates will win."
The ruling alliance had 27 but is two down because of the jailed MLAs. With the AIMIM and Samajwadi Party supporting the alliance, its numbers have gone up to 29.
In the dead heat, with both sides needing 13 votes to win, independent MLAs have become key.
Meetings till late last night underscored just how much is at stake for both the ruling alliance and the BJP.
The total votes have come down to 285 after the death of Shiv Sena MLA Ramesh Latke.