Nagpur: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Sunday announced three candidates – Anil Bonde, Piyush Goyal and Dhananjay Mahadik — for the Rajya Sabha elections to be held for six seats in Maharashtra on June 10. NCP, too, declared Praful Patel’s name for the polls. Patel is likely to file his nomination on Monday. Congress is yet to decide the name of its candidate as the party will be contesting one seat.
As BJP has decided to contest three seats, the elections will be a tough fight between the Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi (MVA) coalition and the BJP, which may lead to horse-trading because candidates are to be elected by 288 members of the State Assembly. Going by the current strength, BJP can easily elect two, while the three MVA partners can send one member each to the Upper House. But BJP decided to field its third candidate.
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25 July 2025
Shiv Sena has already nominated Sanjay Raut and the party’s Kolhapur district chief Sanjay Pawar as its candidate for the election. Both leaders filed their nominations in the presence of Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray, NCP chief Sharad Pawar and prominent leaders from Congress on Thursday.
The required number of votes to win is 42. With BJP having 106, Sena 55, NCP 53, and Congress 44 members in the Assembly, every party has excess votes over the quota to win stipulated seats, but they fall short to bag an additional seat. The three ruling parties claim to have 171 members, including a few independents and smaller parties, on their side, while BJP says its tally stands at 115, meaning that the MVA is in a better position to win the sixth seat.
Goyal, who holds key portfolios in the central government, has been a member of the Rajya Sabha since 2010. This would be his third term as an RS member. While Bonde was Agriculture Minister in the erstwhile Devendra Fadnavis-led BJP Government in the state, he lost the polls to Swabhimani Shetkari Sanghatana (SSS) MLA Devendra Bhuyar. Mahadik is a former NCP MP who joined BJP in 2019.
Patel will be contesting the polls for a fifth term in the Rajya Sabha as he was first elected to the Upper House in 2000. He was again elected to RS in 2005 before winning the Lok Sabha election in 2009 from the Bhandara-Gondia constituency. In 2014, he lost the polls to BJP’s Nana Patole. The same year, NCP leader Tariq Anwar, who was elected to Lok Sabha, quit from Rajya Sabha and Patel was re-nominated from Anwar’s seat.
Imran Pratapgarhi, a poet and Congress leader from Uttar Pradesh, is likely to be the party’s nominee from Maharashtra. The other name from Congress includes former Union Minister Mukul Wasnik.
The last date for filing nominations is May 31.
