The election for 37 Rajya Sabha seats across 10 states came down to thrillers that played out in Odisha, Bihar and Haryana. These three states, with the combined strength of 11 seats, engaged in contest while the rest were decided unopposed. The cat-and-mouse game of resort-hopping and cross-voting led to a nail-biting finish, which seems to have become par for the course in elections to the Upper House of Parliament.
Odisha had a history of strong party discipline, with rare exceptions like in 2002 when Dilip Ray managed to garner votes across parties. This time, Ray entered the fray as a BJPbacked independent candidate and unleashed a chain of events from the Congress herding off its MLAs to a Bengaluru resort and alleging large bribes offered for votes.When the numbers came out, Ray had managed to gain 11 votes, eight from the BJD and three from the Congress, to cross the fi nish line. In the process, the BJP gained a seat, while the BJD and the Congress together lost one despite having the numbers. In Bihar, the NDA made a clean sweep of fi ve seats, thanks to three Congress and one RJD MLAs’ ‘absence’.
However, Haryana, with two seats on offer and the numbers stacked equally between the BJP and the Congress, had the most dramatic climax. Though Congress’s Karamvir Boudh managed to scrape through against BJP-backed independent Satish Nandal, deep cracks were exposed as five Congress MLAs cross-voted and four others’ votes were declared invalid.
The end result is that the NDA consolidated its position in the Rajya Sabha with its seats rising from 135 to 141. On the other hand, the INDIA bloc’s count went down from 62 to 58. Despite gaining two seats to take its tally to 29, Congress legislators’ proneness to cross-voting exposed worsening internal problems and slipping organisational control. In truth, these elections established cross-voting as a norm in the current political climate, refl ecting ideological erosion, opportunism and vulnerability to coercion or inducement.
An attempt was made during Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s NDA government to make Rajya Sabha elections more transparent with a shift from secret to open ballot. When the process was challenged, the Supreme Court upheld it with the observation, “If secrecy becomes a source for corruption, then sunlight and transparency have the capacity to remove it.” Today, it has a ring of irony to it.