A high-stakes battle for the Upper House

Elections to 57 Rajya Sabha seats across 15 states will be held on June 10 but the focus will be on four seats spread across Haryana, Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Karnataka. In the first three, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has thrown down the gauntlet to the Opposition by fielding additional candidates and the Congress, the BJP and the Janata Dal (Secular) are locked in a threeway fight for the fourth seat on offer.

Elections to the Upper House have turned from largely anodyne affairs to thrilling, down to the wire fights in recent years as old political calculations have been abandoned by a party looking to trounce opponents at every turn. For the BJP, which crossed the 100-seat mark in the Upper House in the last round of elections earlier this year, these polls represent an opportunity to gain a firmer hand on its central legislative agenda, insulating core elements of its ideological charter from Opposition scrutiny and attempts to send bills to committees. For the Opposition, the stakes are higher — with its diminished presence in the Lower House where the government has a brute majority, it is in the Council of the States that non-BJP parties can wield legislative influence.

Hanging in the balance are the fates of the Congress’s Ajay Maken whose battle to secure his seat ahead of BJP-supported independent candidate, Kartikeya Sharma, rests on razor’s edge in Haryana, and Pramod Tiwari, who faces a difficult battle against BJP-backed independent candidate, Subhash Chandra, in Rajasthan. In Maharashtra, too, the BJP’s third candidate, Dhananjay Mahadik, will test the ruling Maha

Vikas Aghadi’s cohesion and floor management as every last vote will need to be corralled by the three partners to ensure that the Shiv Sena’s second candidate, Sanjay Pawar, wins. After a string of recent electoral reverses, the Congress and its allies will be keen to avoid any embarrassment.