New Delhi, 22 Aug

With the Opposition pick for vice president elections, B Sudarshan Reddy filing nomination on Thursday, battle lines are drawn between him and NDA nominee CP Radhakrishnan.

While Radhakrishnan is the Governor of Maharashtra and a BJP leader from Tamil Nadu with roots in RSS, Reddy is a former judge of the Supreme Court. The 9 September vice-presidential election has been described by the Opposition as an ideological battle with numbers favouring the ruling NDA.

It has emerged as a "South versus South" battle with Reddy hailing from Telangana and Radhakrishnan from Tamil Nadu, who is described as a "Pachai Tamizhan" (true-blue Tamil) by well-wishers.

Maharashtra Governor Radhakrishnan, 67, is a senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader who served as a two-term member of the Lok Sabha from Coimbatore during the tenure of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and later went on to lead the party in Tamil Nadu.

Reddy, 79, who retired from the apex court in July 2011, is a veteran jurist known for several landmark judgments criticising the then Union government for showing slackness in probing black-money cases. He had also declared Salwa Judum, appointed by the Chhattisgarh government, unconstitutional.

As an apex court judge, Reddy ordered the constitution of a Special Investigation Team (SIT) to take all steps for bringing back unaccounted monies unlawfully kept in bank accounts abroad. Retrieving black money deposited in foreign banks was a key electoral plank of the BJP ahead of the 2014 Lok Sabha election, which saw Narendra Modi become the prime minister.

The NDA is projecting Radhakrishnan as an untainted leader with rich political and administrative experience for the vice-president's office and maintaining that this would also prove useful as the chairman of the Rajya Sabha.

Radhakrishnan was the chairman of the All India Coir Board from 2016 to 2020, a period when coir exports witnessed a significant jump.

BJP president JP Nadda described Radhakrishnan as a "statesman" who commands respect across party lines. He belongs to the influential Gounder caste, an Other Backward Classes (OBC) community in Tamil Nadu.

The Congress-led INDIA bloc is projecting Reddy as a consistent and courageous champion of social, economic and political justice. He has had a long and eminent legal career, including as a judge of the Andhra Pradesh High Court, the chief justice of the Gauhati High Court and a judge of the Supreme Court.

Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge has described the vice-presidential election as an ideological battle. "He is a pro-poor man and in many of his judgments ... he favoured the poor people and also protected the Constitution and fundamental rights," Kharge said on Tuesday after announcing Reddy's name.

The Congress chief was flanked by NCP (SP) leader Sharad Pawar, CPI(M)'s MA Baby, TMC's Derek O'Brien, DMK's Tiruchi Siva and Samajwadi Party's Dharmendra Yadav.

Meanwhile, the office of the returning officer said, as many as 40 nominations were received for the poll till Wednesday, and most of them were rejected for want of documents and Rs 15,000 cash deposit.