Jagdeep Dhankhar To Take Oath As Vice President Of India Today Succeeding M Venkaiah Naidu

Jagdeep Dhankhar was elected as the Vice President of India on August 6 after he defeated the Opposition’s candidate Maragret Alva with a huge margin.

New Delhi: Former West Bengal Governor and National Democratic Alliance (NDA) candidate, Jagdeep Dhankhar will be taking the oath as the 14th Vice President of India today succeding M Venkaiah Naidu. The oath for the office of Vice President will be administered by President Droupadi Murmu at Rashtrapati Bhavan at 11:45 am today, reported news agency ANI.

Dhankhar was elected as the Vice President of India on August 6 after he defeated the Opposition’s candidate Maragret Alva with a huge margin. The BJP-led NDA candidate won the election with 528 votes against Alva who got 182 votes. 

On August 7, Chief Election Commissioner Rajiv Kumar and Election Commissioner Anup Chandra Pandey jointly signed the ‘Certification of the Election of Jagdeep Dhankhar as the next Vice President of India’. 

The Vice President is also the ex-officio chairman of the Rajya Sabha. 

Dhankar secured a voting percentage of 74.39 per cent which is the highest winning margin in the last six vice presidential elections held since 1997. 

The returning officer of the vice presidential election said of the total 780 electors, 725 cast their ballots but 15 votes were found to be invalid. The turnout was 92.94 per cent, he said, adding that a candidate needed 356 votes to get elected.

The Trinamool Congress which has a total of 36 MPs, including 23 in Lok Sabha, had abstained from voting, however two of its parliamentarians had cast their ballots. As many as 55 MPs did not participate in the polling process for the election of Vice President of India. 

Dhankhar, 71 is a lawyer by profession who was one of the leading professionals in the country and has practised in both, the Rajasthan High Court and the Supreme Court of India. He served as the governor of West Bengal in 2019. He stepped into public life after getting elected as the Member of Parliament (MP) from Jhunjhunu in the 1989 Lok Sabha elections and later was elected MLA to Rajasthan Assembly from Ajmer's Kishangarh constituency in 1993. 

Born in an agrarian household in a remote village in the Jhunjhunu district of Rajasthan, Dhankhar completed his school education at Sainik School in Chittorgarh. After completing his graduation in Physics, he pursued LLB from the University of Rajasthan.