Dilip Ray, the Bharatiya Janata Party-backed (BJP-backed) independent candidate, secured the fourth Rajya Sabha seat from Odisha, overcoming the numerical advantage of the Biju Janata Dal-Congress (BJD-Congress) alliance through substantial cross-voting. This victory echoed Ray’s previous success in leveraging dissent, as he garnered support from 11 non-BJP MLAs – eight from the BJD and three from the Congress – despite party whips. In the 147-member Odisha Assembly, the BJP has 79 MLAs, the BJD has 50, and the Congress 14, with three Independents and one CPI(M) legislator. Under the single transferable vote (STV) system of proportional representation, a seat required at least 30 first-preference votes. The BJP comfortably claimed two seats, while the BJD secured one. The fourth seat turned into a high-stakes contest between Ray and Dr. Datteswar Hota, the joint candidate of the BJD, Congress, and CPI(M). Cross-voting ultimately proved decisive. A total of 11 MLAs who defied their parties backed Ray, including eight from the BJD and three from the Congress.From the BJD: Souvic Biswal (Choudwar-Cuttack), who cited the poor treatment of his father, former legislator Prabhat Biswal, at Naveen Patnaik’s residence after he sought a Rajya Sabha ticket; Subasini Jena (Basta, Balasore), wife of former MP Rabindra Jena—who had quit the BJD and joined the BJP shortly before a court hearing in a CBI chargesheeted case—and who also cross-voted in favour of Dilip Ray; Chakramani Kanhar (Baliguda, Kandhamal), who went incommunicado ahead of the vote; Sanatan Mahakud and Arvind Mahapatra, both suspended from the party a month earlier; Debi Ranjan Tripathy (Banki), who said Biju Patnaik spent his final days with Dilip Ray and accused the BJD of “committing suicide” by aligning with the Congress, adding that his father too had been suspended from the party; Ramakanta Bhoi (Tirtol), a 2021 defector from the BJP; and Nabakishore Mallick (Jayadev).From the Congress: Sofia Firdous (Barabati-Cuttack), whose father Mohd Moquim was expelled from the party and has since floated a regional outfit; Ramesh Jena (Sanakhemundi), who said, “I voted for whomever I wanted to vote, I don’t know about the vote maths”; and Dasarathi Gomango (Mohana), who was unreachable to the Pradesh Congress Committee (PCC) leadership and claimed on polling day that he had followed the party line, attributing his inaccessibility to his remote constituency.BJD spokesperson Lenin Mohanty alleged that “only chit fund accused have been pressurised to cross-vote in favour of BJP,” in a pointed reference to some rebels. Reacting to the outcome, former chief minister and BJD president Naveen Patnaik said: “Those who have voted for [the] BJP, most of them have criminal pasts. I am ashamed to say, you can check for yourself how many of their parents went to jail.” Bhakta Charan Das, the OPCC president, said: “We already knew who was with us and who was not. We were giving every one of them a chance until this Rajya Sabha election.” The result exposed vulnerabilities in the BJD-Congress understanding in Odisha, where personal grievances, suspensions, and alleged inducements fractured unity. It also bolstered the BJP’s dominance after its 2024 Assembly triumph and reaffirmed Ray’s reputation for capitalising on internal opposition rifts in key electoral battles.State of the parties: BJP, BJD and CongressAfter its defeat in the 2024 Assembly elections and the loss of political power in the state, the BJD grappled with serious organisational and leadership challenges. A significant number of its Rajya Sabha MPs defected to the BJP following the polls. The prolonged health ailments afflicting the BJD supremo, Naveen Patnaik, further created a vacuum at the top. The lingering influence of Patnaik’s former political secretary and ex-bureaucrat V.K. Pandian also haunted the party; his style of functioning proved unacceptable to many MLAs, who voiced public discontent after the electoral setback. Pandian was widely blamed as the principal reason for the BJD’s defeat after two decades in power, perhaps unfairly, masking deeper structural issues such as the party’s failure to build robust cadres, its over-reliance on personal charisma, and excessive centralisation of authority. At the grassroots level, in urban local bodies, panchayat samitis, and gram panchayats, numerous sarpanches and block chairpersons formerly affiliated with the BJD switched en masse to the new ruling party. The BJP government also expanded the formal powers of block-level executive authorities, enabling them to make financial decisions that directly affected the ability of sarpanches and chairpersons to sustain local cadres through public works contracts. Meanwhile, the Odisha unit of the Congress was in a revival mode under the leadership of Das, who had undertaken multiple padyatras and successfully organised a statewide bandh after assuming charge as OPCC chief. Das sought to project unity amid factionalism by emphasising dialogue and the renewal of the party’s grassroots organisation. By contrast, the ruling BJP continues to grow organisationally and has emerged as a stronger force than ever, bolstered by its hold on political power and its recent Rajya Sabha win.Political implications of Ray winning the fourth seatThe act of the eight MLAs who defied the BJD’s whip was not altogether surprising. Two of them had already been suspended. In two other cases, the MLAs’ fathers had been suspended by the party, while in another, the MLA’s husband had shifted to the BJP shortly before the vote. This election also went against the worst fears of the BJD leaders that there would be a mass revolt leading to a split in the party. Such a major revolt was avoided. Forty-two MLAs stood with the BJD and supported Naveen Patnaik’s decisions. With the revival of the political action committee within the BJD, and with 42 MLAs still behind Patnaik in the latest round of organisational role distribution, this could yet prove beneficial to the party. In the lead-up to election day, various second-rung leaders were also seen in action supporting the party president. The broader collapse and decay that many had speculated about, therefore, did not materialise.For the Congress, the biggest surprise came from Jena. There was speculation that a personal rift between him and the OPCC president may have played a role in his cross-voting in favour of the BJP. He may also have been considering his political future within the BJP, given that 11 of the 13 seats in Ganjam district in the 2024 elections went to the BJP. Jena had been in the race for the OPCC president’s post and may have signalled his dissatisfaction by disobeying the party line. Gomango of the Congress, whose constituency is adjacent to Jena’s and who also voted for Ray, may have been influenced by Jena. Even so, this Rajya Sabha election suggested that 11 of the Congress’s 14 MLAs remained with the OPCC leadership. Since many of these MLAs belong to the south and western belt of the state, where the Congress has historically performed well, the party’s footprint there could grow.The difficulties of both the Congress and the BJD cannot be reduced to factionalism alone, since factional competition has long been part of political life. The more pressing question for the Congress is whether it can convert the present moment of limited revival under Das into a more institutional form of collective leadership. That would require regular mechanisms of internal consultation, a credible distribution of responsibilities across levels of the organisation, and stronger local structures capable of mediating conflict before it turns into public dissidence. Without such organisational deepening, periodic revival may not translate into durable political recovery.The challenge before the BJD is different but equally fundamental. After decades of dominance, it now faces the test of whether it can sustain cohesiveness beyond the personal authority and public credibility of Naveen Patnaik. The party’s recent troubles have exposed deeper structural weaknesses: fragile cadres, excessive centralisation, and dependence on office for local cohesion. If the BJD is to remain a serious pole of competition in Odisha, it will need to institutionalise leadership beyond charisma by cultivating a second rung, widening internal consultation, and rebuilding a more autonomous grassroots organisation. In that sense, the fourth Rajya Sabha seat was not only a contest over representation in the Upper House. It was also a test of whether Odisha’s opposition parties could evolve from leader-centred or episodically revived formations into more durable organisational vehicles. The answer will have important consequences for the quality of democratic competition in the state.The significance of this contest lay not only in who secured the fourth Rajya Sabha seat. It also lay in what the episode revealed about the condition of party democracy in Odisha: the difficulties opposition parties faced in surviving defeat, the continued dependence of regional formations on charismatic authority, and the growing asymmetry between ruling and non-ruling parties in contemporary India. In that sense, the result was not just a story of cross-voting. It was also a small but telling indicator of how democratic competition in the state was being reorganised.Dhiren Swain is a joint PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne and IIT Madras. Vignesh Karthik K.R. is a postdoctoral research affiliate in Indian and Indonesian politics at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, Leiden and a research affiliate at King’s India Institute, King’s College London.