​​​​​​​Lucknow, October 5: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Monday announced eight candidates for the upcoming biennial elections to the Rajya Sabha from Uttar Pradesh. Polling for 10 Rajya Sabha seats from the country’s most populous state is scheduled to be held on October 16.

The announcement came a day before the deadline for filing nominations for the elections.

The BJP has fielded Dharampal Singh, Radhakant Ojha, Prakash Pal, Vidyasagar Sonkar, Gopi Krishna Pandey, Priyanka Singh Rawat, Ram Pratap Singh Chauhan and Shruti Gangwar for the eight seats.

The candidate list reflects the BJP’s effort to balance demographic considerations and caste equations while also giving representation to women. Priyanka Singh Rawat and Shruti Gangwar are the two women candidates named by the party.

The BJP is expected to comfortably secure seven of the 10 seats in the October 16 elections based on its strength in the Uttar Pradesh Assembly.

The Samajwadi Party (SP), which has 101 MLAs in the 403-member Assembly, is in a position to win two seats. The Akhilesh Yadav-led party has already nominated Ram Gopal Yadav and Dhanraj Nathwani, a senior executive at Reliance Industries Limited, as its candidates.

The contest for the tenth seat is expected to be closely fought, with both the BJP and SP likely to deploy their full electoral strength. The battle has also triggered speculation over the possibility of cross-voting during the election.

Earlier, on Sunday, the BJP announced its candidates for one Rajya Sabha seat each from West Bengal and Uttarakhand.

According to the current strength of the Rajya Sabha, the BJP has 116 members and is the single-largest party in the Upper House.

With the BJP expected to gain seats in the upcoming biennial elections, the strength of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in the 245-member Rajya Sabha is also set to increase.