Mumbai: Counting for the 28 graduates' and teachers' constituencies that voted on 23 October stretched across nearly two days. When the last result came in on Thursday, the BJP-led NDA had 16 of the 28 seats. The BJP alone won 13, according to the results.
The Congress opened its account with a single seat, the Nagpur Division Graduates' constituency in Maharashtra. It lost all four seats in Karnataka.
Uttar Pradesh carried the most political weight. The Samajwadi Party won five seats there, including two in Varanasi, with an assembly election due in the state next year. In Bihar, Prashant Kishor's Jan Suraaj Party won its first seat in the Upper House. Five sitting MLCs lost across the four states.
In Maharashtra the opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi took three of five. Congress's Abhijeet Wanjari held Nagpur Graduates', while the NCP (Sharadchandra Pawar) won Pune Graduates' and Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar Graduates'. The BJP's Kaustubh Gawade won Pune Teachers' and Shiv Sena's Kiran Sarnaik took Amravati Teachers'. The undivided NCP had held Pune and Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar before the 2023 split.
Voting was on ballot paper, and counting ran into chaos, allegations and protests at several centres. In Nagpur the process ran more than 41 hours from the first round to the declaration.
NCP leader Praful Patel asked for an immediate review of the party's priorities and organisational structure after its only candidate lost.
These constituencies reward ground organisation more than slogans, because parties must enrol graduates and teachers ward by ward before they can ask for a vote. That is why the results are read as a measure of cadre strength ahead of next year's assembly contests. In the 78-member Council the BJP remains the largest party, and the arithmetic of the Upper House has shifted with this round.