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Maderna elected unopposed as Rajasthan speaker

Senior Congress politician Parasram Maderna was today unanimously elected speaker of the Rajasthan Legislative Assembly.

Finance Minister Chandan Mal Baid proposed Maderna's name for the coveted post. Opposition member and former minister Bhanwar Lal Sharma of the Bharatiya Janata Party seconded the proposal.

Pro-tem speaker Bhairon Singh Shekhawat then declared Maderna elected unopposed.

Maderna will be Rajasthan's fifteenth speaker.

His election to the post was a foregone conclusion as his was the only proposal submitted to the assembly secretariat till the expiry of the deadline on January 4, the opening day of the inaugural session of the newly constituted legislature.

The Congress has a formidable three-fourths majority in the 200-member house that has three vacancies. The BJP, which ruled the state for eight years, finished a distant second in the November 25 election with 33 seats. The Janata Dal won three seats, the Bahujan Samaj Party two, and the Rashtriya Janata Dal and Communist Party of India (Marxist) one each, while independents bagged seven.

Maderna will bring to the presiding officer's chair four decades of experience in varied positions -- in government, the opposition, and the party.

A nine-time member of the assembly, he has held ministerial posts in various Congress governments between 1962 and 1985 and was leader of the opposition in the assembly twice, besides being head of the state Congress for nearly five years.

He was elected to the assembly for the first time in 1957 from Osian in Jodhpur district and was re-elected in 1962 from the same constituency. He won in 1967, 1972, 1977 and 1980 from Bhopalgarh assembly segment of the same district. From 1977 to 1980, he was leader of the opposition in the state assembly.

Maderna tasted electoral defeat in Bhopalgarh in 1985, but returned to the house in 1990. In 1993, he shifted to Gudamalani in Barmer district, from where he won to become leader of the opposition once again. This time, Maderna is once again representing his old constituency, Bhopalgarh.

Assembly Elections '98

UNI

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