Calcutta, March 26: Four Left Front candidates and an Independent were elected to the Rajya Sabha today.

Shyamal Chakraborty, Tarini Roy and Prasanta Chatterjee of the CPM and Debabrata Biswas of the Forward Bloc are the new front MPs. Ahmad Sayeed Malihabadi, the editor of an Urdu daily, made it with the support of the Left as well as the Congress.

The SUCI, which had yesterday said it would abstain from the elections, today voted for the Trinamul Congress’s Dinesh Trivedi. “We voted for Trinamul on Mamata Banerjee’s request,’’ said the SUCI’s Debaprasad Sarkar.

Trinamul and the SUCI have already joined hands for the May panchayat polls.

CPM’s Roy, however, won on second-preference votes because of “wrong markings’’ by one of his party colleagues and the cancellation of his ballot. Roy, who needed 49, got 48 first-preference votes.

Among the nine surplus votes in favour of Malihabadi — he got 58 — four had Roy as the second choice. That took Roy’s tally to 52. Chakraborty, Chatterjee and Biswas got 51, 50 and 50 votes.

Trinamul’s Trivedi got 31.

Asked how a ballot cast by a front MLA became invalid, the CPM’s Rabin Deb said: “He had inadvertently made some wrong markings.”