Meet India's new Vice President: Who is CP Radhakrishnan?

CP Radhakrishnan

NDA candidate CP Radhakrishnan on Tuesday won the vice presidential elections with 452 votes while INDIA bloc's B Sudershan Reddy managed to secure 300 votes. Fifteen votes were considered invalid.

A total of 98.20 per cent voter turnout was found in the Vice Presidential elections, wherein 767 MPs cast their vote out of 788. A total of 13 MPs abstained from voting in the Vice Presidential elections.

The Vice President's post has been vacant since July 21, 2025, as Jagdeep Dhankhar resigned from his position, citing health reasons.

Chandrapuram Ponnusamy Radhakrishnan, popularly known as CP Radhakrishnan, is a veteran politician, currently serving as the governor of Maharashtra.

Born on May 4, 1957, in Tiruppur, Tamil Nadu, Radhakrishnan began his political journey at the age of 16 as a volunteer of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and later joined the Bharatiya Jan Sangh. He holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration from VO Chidambaram College in Tuticorin.

Radhakrishnan’s electoral breakthrough came in the aftermath of the 1998 Coimbatore bombings, when he was elected to the Lok Sabha from Coimbatore. He was re-elected in 1999 and served as chairman of the Parliamentary standing committee on textiles.

During his Parliamentary career, he also represented India at the UN General Assembly in 2004 and was part of the first Indian parliamentary delegation to Taiwan.

He served as the Tamil Nadu BJP president from 2004 to 2007, undertaking a 93-day, 19,000 km ‘Rath Yatra’ across the state to campaign for river-linking, eradication of untouchability, and a uniform civil code.

In 2016, he was appointed chairman of the All India Coir Board under the Ministry of MSME, where he helped achieve record export figures.

Radhakrishnan was governor of Jharkhand from February 2023 to July 2024, during which he was also given additional responsibilities as governor of Telangana and lieutenant governor of Puducherry. On July 31, 2024, he was sworn in as the governor of Maharashtra.

He is the first person from South India and only the second OBC leader to be nominated for the post of Vice President. Belonging to the Kongu Vellala Gounder community, Radhakrishnan is seen as a strategic choice for the NDA, particularly in the run-up to elections in Tamil Nadu.