Can the BJP take back the Rajya Sabha after the Assembly elections?

In the balance hangs the GST Bill, which enjoys some support across the aisle, but has been blocked in the Upper House by the Congress and some of its allies

Will this be the year the BJP-led NDA gets a working majority in the Rajya Sabha?

Consider that nearly 75 MPs in the Rajya Sabha will retire and be replaced by new faces.

Some of them – like Venkaiah Naidu, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goel (all three retire in the summer of 2016) – are ministers are will be given another term: not from Bihar as expected on account of the BJP’s disastrous showing the assembly elections of 2015, or Telangana, where the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) is on a high, but possibly from Andhra Pradesh where the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) is an alliance partner of the BJP.

A lot also depends on the outcome of the assembly elections in Assam, West Bengal, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Puducherry. Vacancies in the Rajya Sabha from Tamil Nadu, for instance, will arise AFTER the assembly election results are out.

Here are some basic facts about the Rajya Sabha:

The actual strength of the Rajya Sabha is 245 members, of which 233 are elected and 12 are nominated. The allocation of seats in the Rajya Sabha is on the basis of population. The current allocation is as per the table below (Source: Rajya Sabha)

States	No. of seats
Andhra Pradesh	18
Arunachal Pradesh	1
Assam	7
Bihar	16
Chhattisgarh	5
Goa	1
Gujarat	11
Haryana	5
Himachal Pradesh	3
Jammu and Kashmir	4
Jharkhand	6
Karnataka	12
Kerala	9
Madhya Pradesh	11
Maharashtra	19
Manipur	1
Meghalaya	1
Mizoram	1
Nagaland	1
National Capital Territory of Delhi	3
Odisha	10
Puducherry	1
Punjab	7
Rajasthan	10
Sikkim	1
Tamil Nadu	18
Tripura	1
Uttarakhand	3
Uttar Pradesh	31
West Bengal	16

 

For those who have forgotten how RS MPs are elected, it is on the basis of an electoral college comprising Members of Legislative Assemblies of States and Union territories in accordance with the system of proportional representation by means of the single transferable vote.  The number of MPs a party can send to the Upper House from a state depends on how many MLAs your party has in the state Assembly. Sometimes independent MPs can ‘influence’ MLAs to transfer their surplus votes to them. That is how Vijay Mallya became a Rajya Sabha MP.

Ultimately, though, it is the party that decides who should be sent to the RS and directs MLAs to vote accordingly. Five MPs from Punjab retiring in April for instance, have been replaced in proportion to the strength of their party in the assembly – so while Ashwani Kumar and MS Gill have been replaced by Partap Bajwa and Shamsher Singh Dullo, the composition of the Upper House hasn’t changed: Congress continues to have two and Akali Dal two (Naresh Gujral and SS Dhindsa have been renominated by their party). The BJP’s Avinash Rai Khanna has been replaced by Shwet Malik, Mayor of Amritsar.

What remains an open question, however, is the configuration of MPs from Tamil Nadu. Here the nomination to RS will come immediately after the Assembly elections. At this point, the RS seats are dominated by the AIADMK. But what if DMK and its alliance partners win the assembly election? Five MPs are retiring from Tamil Nadu in June.

Five nominated MPs will be replaced. The retiring five are choices of the UPA government. The new five will be choices of the NDA government.

For our purposes, the passage of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) constitution amendment bill (which must be passed by a two thirds majority) is the central issue. The bill has bipartisan support. The Janata Dal United, for instance, which is otherwise opposed to the NDA is supporting GST in the ‘larger national interest’. The AIADMK is otherwise not opposed to the BJP but is opposing GST because it will hurt Tamil Nadu’s commercial interests. What if AIADMK’s majority was to reduce in the assembly – will it be more amenable to passing the GST (or at least abstaining from voting on it) or less amenable? All these are questions that will be answered in the summer of 2016.