BHUBANESWAR: The BJD Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha members voted in favour of NDA's vice-presidential candidate, Jagdeep Dhankhar, at the Parliament House in New Delhi on Saturday.
Earlier, BJD president and chief minister Naveen Patnaik had announced his party's support for Dhankhar's candidature after Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke to him over phone. On July 26, the BJD MPs also met Dhankhar in New Delhi ahead of the polls to be held on August 6.
The BJD's support in the vice-presidential poll is crucial as the party has 12 MPs in the Lok Sabha and nine members in the Rajya Sabha. Only MPs vote in the vice-presidential polls.
Even as the BJD supremo had supported NDA's presidential candidate Ram Nath Kovind in 2017, he had backed Gopalkrishna Gandhi, who was the opposition's vice-presidential candidate. BJD's support to Dhankhar assumes significance in view of the chief minister's consistent stand of BJD maintaining an equidistance from both the BJP and the Congress.
