The Congress on Thursday raised apprehensions that elections to the Rajya Sabha seats falling vacant from Gujarat due to the resignations of BJP leaders Amit Shah and Smriti Irani following their wins in the Lok Sabha polls will be held separately to ensure the ruling dispensation’s victory on both the seats. The party demanded elections to the two Rajya Sabha seats be held together.

Congress spokesperson Abhishek Manu Singhvi said they came to know that there could be a bid to hold the elections for the two seats separately. “This would be a mockery of our constitutional ethos. It would be completely contrary to conventions. Whenever there are two seats of a State going vacant, you have elections together. It is obvious to everybody that the purpose of that is to ensure there is a fair exercise of franchise of each MLA,” Singhvi said at the AICC press briefing.

“If you have one election today and one after two weeks, four weeks, six weeks then you will enable the ruling party MLAs (lawmakers) to simply cross 51 per cent in the assembly of Gujarat and elect him in the first round and him in the second round which is held after weeks,” he said.

The BJP has 99 legislators in the Gujarat Assembly and the Congress 77. If the election to each seat is held on different days, the BJP is expected to win both, while if the voting is held on the same day, the Congress could win one of the seats.

Any such “games” should be throttled at the inception because they are “unconstitutional games”, the Congress spokesperson said.  “We will demand from the Election Commission complete vigilance to ensure that whenever you want to have elections...They have to be held together. You cannot use a technicality to hold them separately,” Singhvi said.

He said the party will approach the Election Commission with its demand of holding of the elections of the two Rajya Sabha seats in Gujarat together.