AAP MLA Ram Niwas Goel elected Speaker of Delhi Assembly

New Delhi, Feb 23: AAP MLA Ram Niwas Goel was on Monday unanimously elected Speaker of the Delhi Assembly on the first day of the two-day session of the House.

Another ruling party legislator, Bandana Kumari, was elected Deputy Speaker of the House where the main and only opposition, BJP, has a negligible presence with just three legislators.

67-year-old Goel was elected from Shahdara constituency in north Delhi where he defeated BJP's Jitender Singh Shunty by a margin of over 11,000 votes in the recently-concluded Assembly polls.

Incidentally, an FIR was registered against Goel on Feb. 7 following a complaint by a realtor who accused him and a number of his supporters of raiding houses in the area. Kumar, 41, who was elected Deputy Speaker, is president of the women's wing of Aam Aadmi Party (AAP).

She is an MLA from Shalimar Bagh constituency from where she was elected in the 2013 Assembly polls as well. This time, Kumari defeated BJP's Rekha Gupta by a margin of 10,978 votes.

AAP won a whopping 67 seats in the Assembly polls while BJP got a paultry three and Congress drew a blank.

PTI