Bhopal: All three Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) candidates from Madhya Pradesh, Tarun Chugh, Rajneesh Agrawal and Mahesh Kewat, were declared elected unopposed to the Rajya Sabha on Thursday, June, 11 by the Returning Officer, a Vidhan Sabha official said.
The three candidates displayed their certificates of election after receiving them from the Returning Officer at the state assembly premises.
They then left the building without speaking to the media personnel waiting outside.
BJP MLA Bhagwan Das Sabnani and the ruling party’s state media in-charge Ashish Agrawal accompanied the newly elected candidates.
Kewat was pitted against Congress ex-MP Meenakshi Natarajan, but her nomination was rejected on charges of concealing information in the affidavit.
Won’t interfere with elections: SC
The development comes after the Supreme Court declined to stay the Rajya Sabha election process in Madhya Pradesh, even as it agreed to hear on Friday a plea by Congress leader Meenakshi Natarajan challenging the rejection of her nomination papers.
A bench of Justices Prashant Kumar Mishra and Atul S Chandurkar refused to pass any interim order restraining authorities from declaring the election result, citing the settled legal position laid down in the Election Commission of India vs Ashok Kumar (2000) judgment that courts should ordinarily refrain from intervening once an electoral process is underway.
Senior advocate Abhishek Manu Singhvi, appearing for Natarajan, urged the court to at least prevent declaration of the result, warning that with Thursday being the last day for withdrawal of nominations, BJP candidates could be declared elected unopposed once the deadline passed.
The bench was unmoved. “Sorry, we cannot,” it told Singhvi, agreeing only to list the matter for Friday.
Natarajan, the Congress’s sole candidate for one of the three Rajya Sabha seats from Madhya Pradesh, challenged a June 9 order by returning officer Arvind Sharma rejecting her nomination. The rejection came after BJP leaders objected that she had failed to disclose in her election affidavit a notice issued to her by a Hyderabad court in October 2025.
The Congress has argued that the proceedings had not reached the stage of cognisance and therefore did not constitute a pending criminal case requiring disclosure under election law, adding that Natarajan was a respondent in the matter and not an accused.
Senior advocate Mukul Rohatgi, appearing for the BJP objectors, opposed the plea, while the Election Commission’s counsel questioned its maintainability, saying papers had not been served on the Commission. A senior Congress delegation had met the Election Commission on Wednesday seeking reversal of the rejection order.
With inputs from PTI
Follow on Twitter | Posted by Mohammed Baleegh | 
