In a major defeat for the Congress, the Bharatiya Janata Party's Krishan Lal Panwar and the saffron party-backed Independent candidate Kartikeya Sharma were elected for the two Rajya Sabha seats from Haryana in the wee hours of Saturday, 11 June, after overnight vote-counting.
Congress candidate and senior leader Ajay Maken, who had been touted to win by the party, lost the polls by a small margin.
The counting of votes began past midnight and the results were announced after 2 am on Saturday. The Congress said one of its MLAs, Kuldeep Bishnoi, cross-voted while the vote of an MLA was declared invalid.
"We were ahead of Independent candidate under preference 1. We objected that 1 vote which was given to independent should be cancelled. Unfortunately our vote was cancelled and their rejected vote was accepted. We're getting this examined legally," Maken was quoted as saying by ANI on Saturday.