Which one of the following statements is correct with reference to India?

India's Constitution regulates membership of the two Houses of Parliament under Articles 84, 101 and 102: a person is free to contest an election to either House regardless of a seat already held in the other House, but Article 101(1) bars actually holding a seat in both Houses of Parliament (or a House of Parliament and a State Legislature) at the same time — so a person who wins a seat in a second House while already holding one in the first must, within the time the law allows, choose to retain only one seat and resign the other; if no choice is made in time, the earlier seat is vacated automatically by operation of law.

Applying this to a sitting Rajya Sabha member who contests a Lok Sabha election: the Constitution places no bar on the contest itself. Only if that member wins the Lok Sabha seat does Article 101(1) require them to vacate the Rajya Sabha seat, since holding both simultaneously is not permitted. Several MPs — for instance Arun Jaitley and Manmohan Singh — have contested a Lok Sabha election while serving in the Rajya Sabha.

Why the other statements do not hold:

• State Legislative Assemblies electing the President on their own — false: the President's electoral college is the elected members of both Houses of Parliament plus the elected members of every State Legislative Assembly (and of Delhi and Puducherry), not the Assemblies acting alone.

• A Vice-Presidential candidate needing to already be a Rajya Sabha member — false: Article 66(3) only requires eligibility for election as a member of the Council of States; the candidate need not currently hold that seat.

• The Constitution barring all nominated members — false: Article 80 still lets the President nominate up to 12 Rajya Sabha members for distinction in literature, science, art and social service; only the Lok Sabha's separate Anglo-Indian nomination clause (Article 331) was removed, by the 104th Constitutional Amendment Act, 2019 (with effect from 25 January 2020).

Hence, the statement that a person contesting a Lok Sabha election may be a sitting member of the Rajya Sabha is the constitutionally accurate one.