The upcoming biennial elections in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand are scheduled to help the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) bring its Rajya Sabha count to 92 members and make up for losses due to the departure of two key allies: Shiv Sena and Akali Dal. The Congressional-led Opposition count is likely to drop below 100 for the first time in the recent past, creating more room for the Narendra Modi government to push through legislation in the Upper House.
The BJP is set to win eight of Uttar Pradesh’s 10 seats and also win the only Uttarakhand seat that will go to the polls on November 9. Eleven members of the Rajya Sabha will retire next month, which will require the last round of biennial elections this year.
Of these 11 seats, the BJP ruler currently holds only three from Uttar Prdesh. The rest is held by the Samajwadi Party, Congress and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). The net profit for the BJP would be six seats, five from UP and one from Uttarakhand, and its account would increase to 92 from the current 86.
This will be enough to make up for the three seats of Shiv Sena and Akali Dal, the two key allies who left the National Democratic Alliance (NDA).
Sena resigned from the NDA after the Maharashtra assembly elections last year and joined the NCP and Congress to form the state government. The Akalis, another trusted ally of the BJP, left the NDA last month over farm bills.
Even if the NDA could not break the majority mark in this round of elections, it will improve its tally to 118 from 112 in the 245-member House. The opposition’s count, on the other hand, will drop from 101 to 95. The majority mark is 123.
While the members of the Lok Sabha are directly elected by the voters, the members of the Rajya Sabha go through a complex process of proportional representation and through the votes of the MLAs of their respective states. The calculation is: (total number of state MLAs ÷ number of seats to vote in state +1) +1. Simply put, more MLA of a party in an assembly means more seats for the party in Rajya Sabha.
Each MLA will rank the candidates based on their preference. If a candidate gets the minimum votes required, they will be elected. But if a candidate does not get the necessary votes from the first preference of voters in a race, the votes from the second preference will be counted.
Although it is a numerical minority, the NDA’s political influence has helped it gain support from regional groups such as All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) from Tamil Nadu, Biju Janata Dal from Odisha, YSR Congress Party from Andhra Pradesh and pass key bills such as the triple talaq and the bifurcation of the state of Jammu and Kashmir into two Union Territories.
During its first days in power, the Modi government faced the heat of Opposition in the Upper House, where bills regularly stalled. On one occasion, amendments to the president’s speech were passed in the opposition-dominated Rajya Sabha, an embarrassment to the government.
“You will notice that in the last two years the BJP has managed to get away with the Rajya Sabha with the support of other parties,” said political analyst Sandeep Shastri. “What will change now is that the BJP will prevail more without the support of other parties. It’s the same difference you see in the 2014 NDA and the 2020 NDA (when it won more seats in the national elections). There is no non-BJP minister in the cabinet. A consolidation of the BJP in Rajya Sabha is also likely to be seen. “
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