NDA candidate Senior Advocate Jagdeep Dhankhar is new Vice President of India

Senior Advocate Jagdeep Dhankhar has won the elections to the post of the Vice President of India.

Dhankhar, who was the candidate fielded by National Democratic Alliance (NDA), won by a margin of 346 votes as he bagged 528 of the 725 votes that were cast. Opposition candidate Margret Alva secured 182 votes while 15 votes were termed invalid, NDTV reported.

Dhankhar, the former Governor of West Bengal, was actively into law practice before he took the plunge into politics.

After graduating in law from the Rajasthan University, Dhankhar started his legal career in the year 1979 at the Jaipur Bench of Rajasthan High Court.

Dhankhar came to be elected as the youngest President of the Rajasthan High Court Bar Association in the year 1987.

He was later elected as a Member of the Rajasthan Bar Council in the year 1988.

In the 11th year of his legal practice he was designated a Senior Advocate by the Rajasthan High Court.

Dhankhar was elected to the 9th Lok Sabha from Rajasthan's Jhunjhunu constituency in 1989.

He then shifted his law practice to the Supreme Court of India. He also had a three-year stint as a member of the ICC International Court of Arbitration, Paris, where he dealt with varied human resource issues and and commercial matters.

Recently, he had voluntarily given up his newly allotted chamber in the Supreme Court.

According to Dhankhar, he was a reluctant entrant into politics.

"The jump in the political arena was sudden in the year 1989 (the entire country was in the throes of the so-called ‘Bofors Scandal’) when I was offered to contest from the Jhunjhunu Parliamentary Constituency," he told Bar & Bench in 2020.

Politics, he added, was the last thing on his mind.

"Though my family is deeply involved with politics, I never thought I’d take a dip in it. In retrospect, I think it was destined. It was never a plan. I never entertained the thought of taking the political plunge. Some find it hard to digest that I was a ‘reluctant politician’, given that I have been an MP, an MLA as also a Union Minister. My heart was never in politics," he said.

Read full interview of Dhankhar here.