NEW DELHI: Congress on Monday moved the Supreme Court seeking simultaneous polls for two Rajya Sabha seats from the state, vacated by BJP leaders Amit Shah and Smriti Irani after their election to Lok Sabha , while accusing the NDA government of influencing the Election Commission to hold separate polls for the seats to enable the saffron party corner both in "breach of the spirit" of proportional representation.

Leader of opposition in Gujarat Assembly, Pareshbai Dhanani, sought quashing of the EC's June 15 notification treating the two seats as stray vacancies to warrant separate elections. He said holding of separate elections for the two seats would deny Congress one of the seats which it is entitled to as per its strength in the Assembly and as per the law mandating proportional representation in Rajya Sabha.

At present, in the 182-member Gujarat assembly, BJP has 100 MLAs while Congress has 71. If separate polls are held for the two seats, both will be bagged by BJP. The petition filed through advocate Varun K Chopra argued that as per the Representation of the People Act, representatives of each state to Rajya Sabha shall be elected by the members of assembly in accordance with the system of proportional representation by means of single transferable vote.

"The conduct of election for each vacancy separately would only lead to one result, that is, the victory of the party which commands simple majority in the state legislature. This would turn the very objective of proportional representations, that is to give each minority group an effective share as per its strength, on its head," Dhanani said.

Both Shah and Irani were elected to Rajya Sabha from Gujarat on August 8, 2017. While Shah was declared elected to LS from Gandhinagar on May 23, Irani was declared elected from Amethi on May 24. Dhanani said whenever a person gets elected to both Houses of Parliament, the vacancy arising in such a situation, after the elected person chooses membership of one House, was covered under Sections 68 and 69 of the RP Act and hence are statutory vacancies, which could not have been termed 'casual vacancies' by the EC to hold separate polls.

Citing earlier instances of simultaneous polls for Rajya Sabha seats from a state, the Gujarat opposition leader said, "BJP which is running the government at the Centre, in order to somehow have its party rule Rajya Sabha and despite not having complete proportion to get both seats to Council of States, is trying to use EC's office to somehow impede the mandate under RP Act for election of members to RS through proportional representation."

Dhanani requested the SC to strike down the June 15 notification of EC for separate polls for two RS seats from Gujarat and sought a direction to the poll panel to hold simultaneous polls.

The petition is likely to be mentioned on Tuesday before a vacation bench of the SC for early hearing.

