NDA's CP Radhakrishnan elected as 15th Vice President of India
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New Delhi: Chandrapuram Ponnusamy Radhakrishnan, who is strongly rooted in the RSS and the BJP, was on Tuesday elected as the 15th Vice President of India, the third leader from Tamil Nadu to occupy the coveted post, PTI reported.
The 67-year-old Radhakrishnan won 452 votes to win the VP's chair to succeed Jagdeep Dhankhar, who resigned as vice president on July 21, taking everyone by surprise.
Radhakrishnan served as the Governor of Maharashtra when he was named the vice presidential nominee of the BJP-led NDA.
A two-term member of the Lok Sabha from Coimbatore during the tenure of former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Radhakrishnan came close to becoming a Union minister, but had to lose out to fellow Tamilan Pon Radhakrishnan in 1998 after some confusion over his name by the then floor managers of the BJP.
Radhakrishnan joined the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) as a teenager and rose through the ranks in the organisation and later in the BJP, gaining acceptability in the party and the state.
A member of the socially dominant and economically prosperous Kongu Vellalar Gounder community, he became the secretary of the BJP's Tamil Nadu unit in 1996 and served as the party's state unit president between 2003 and 2006.
He was sworn in as the governor of Maharashtra on July 31, 2024. Before this, he served as the governor of Jharkhand for nearly one and a half years.
Born on October 20, 1957, at Tiruppur in Tamil Nadu, Radhakrishnan has a Bachelor's degree in Business Administration.
Starting as an RSS swayamsevak at the age of 16, he became a state executive committee member of the Bharatiya Janasangh in 1974.
Between 2004 and 2007, Radhakrishnan served as the Tamil Nadu BJP president.