By KUMAR VIKRAM
The BJP’s Rajya Sabha Gambit: A Party That Counts Every Vote and Honours Very Few
New Delhi, June 9, 2026 — The Rajya Sabha elections scheduled for June 18 tell you everything you need to know about how the BJP exercises power when the cameras are not pointed at it.
In Jharkhand, where the ruling INDIA bloc comfortably controls 56 of 81 assembly seats, the BJP has engineered a contest it cannot win on numbers alone. In Karnataka, it has unceremoniously ended the parliamentary career of a 93-year-old former Prime Minister to whom it owed a political debt. Both moves are signature BJP — audacious, coldly transactional, and entirely in keeping with the party’s approach to India’s upper house.
Start with Jharkhand. Polling for two Rajya Sabha seats in Jharkhand will take place on June 18. One seat fell vacant following the death of JMM co-founder Shibu Soren, while the term of BJP member Deepak Prakash is ending on June 21.
The INDIA bloc’s arithmetic is overwhelming. Within the NDA fold, BJP holds 21 votes, while AJSU, JD(U), and LJP hold one vote each, making a total of 24 votes — leaving them four votes short of the 28 first-preference votes required for victory. On numbers, this should be a two-seat sweep for the ruling alliance.
But the BJP does not concede. Instead, the BJP backed “independent” former MP and businessman Parimal Nathwani in Jharkhand, pointing to the inevitability of cross-voting during the polls.
Nathwani is no ordinary outsider. He is a director of corporate affairs at Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries and is known in political and business circles for his proximity to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
More pointedly, in his first two tenures as Rajya Sabha member from Jharkhand in 2008 and 2014, many legislators of the JMM and RJD had cross-voted in his favour. The BJP is betting the same can happen again.
The Congress has called this precisely what it is. Rakesh Sinha, representing the Jharkhand Congress, per Report Wire, stated that the BJP frequently lectures other parties on political morality and ideology, yet its actions in the current election cycle tell a different story — accusing the BJP of turning the Rajya Sabha elections into a playground for the elite and moving toward “thesaurocracy,” or the rule of wealth.
This is not a one-off. The Bihar and Haryana rounds earlier this year followed the same template.
The Biju Janata Dal suspended six of its MLAs for cross-voting during Rajya Sabha elections in Odisha, and the Congress similarly suspended three of its own legislators. Cross-voting has become so routine a feature of these polls that it has become, as The Federal put it, “an unfortunate norm.”
Then there is what happened to H.D. Deve Gowda. At 93, the former Prime Minister and JD(S) patriarch had every reason to expect another term.
Despite maintaining cordial relations with Prime Minister Modi, Deve Gowda’s ambition to remain an active parliamentarian in the final phase of his political career has not materialised.
The BJP instead named Prof. M. Nagaraj, its own state vice-president, as NDA’s Rajya Sabha candidate from Karnataka. A JD(S) legislator told The Print: “Till late last night, we were expecting that our leader’s name would be announced. We had no idea that he would not be nominated.”
The reaction was withering. Congress general secretary Randeep Singh Surjewala posted on X: “Yesterday in the dead of the night, BJP has denied a Rajya Sabha nomination to former Prime Minister H.D. Deve Gowda, deciding to choose its State Vice President Incharge of ‘Distt Building Construction’, M. Nagaraja over Ex PM. The constant humiliation heaped upon JD(S)…”
Karnataka Congress president B.K. Hariprasad went further, saying the NDA “used and misused” Deve Gowda in Parliament for the smooth passage of bills. The JD(S) official handle on X did not publicly rebuke the BJP — a silence that spoke volumes about Kumaraswamy’s calculus: a ministerial chair in Delhi over his own father’s dignity.
What do both episodes reveal? That for the BJP, the Rajya Sabha is not a chamber of reflection but an instrument of consolidation.
It woos independents and industrialists when it lacks numbers, engineers cross-voting when it can, discards allies when their utility has passed, and does all of it in the dead of night.
In 2026, the NDA bloc is expected to push its Rajya Sabha strength from around 135 to approximately 145 seats — nearly three-fifths of the 245-member House. That is not democratic dominance earned through public mandate in the upper house. It is power assembled piece by piece, vote by defecting vote.
The NDA bloc currently holds roughly 115–120 seats in the Rajya Sabha, including members from BJP, JD(U), Shiv Sena (Shinde faction), and other allies. After June 18 and the remaining 2026 rounds, the opposition’s voice in the house — already diminished — risks becoming a formality.
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