FOR a country that votes as often and noisily as India, elections to the Rajya Sabha, its upper house of parliament, are oddly staid. The body’s 245 members are not elected all at once to their six-year terms. Instead, each state renews one-third of its senators (whose total number depends on the state’s population) every two years. And they are not elected by the public but indirectly by state assemblies, using a system so bafflingly complex that in practice parties often avoid a vote by agreeing among themselves how to apportion seats. In the election that ended on June 11th, 30 of the 57 contested slots were filled this way.

Even so, Rajya Sabha polls are seldom devoid of drama. If parties fail to make deals, or if their members rebel, the results can be unpredictable. This election season began with a scandal in the southern state of Karnataka. Posing as aides to a candidate, journalists secretly filmed four state assembly members demanding bribes of up to 100m rupees (around $1.5m) each in exchange for supporting him. Those deputies are now under investigation.

Elections closed with a whiff of skulduggery in Haryana, a state adjacent to the capital, Delhi. Two of its five seats were in play. The first was a shoo-in for a candidate from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which also governs Haryana. The second seat seemed sure to go to R.K. Anand, a lawyer with the backing of both a strong local party and Congress, the national rival to the BJP. Yet because of an odd procedural error it went instead to Subhash Chandra, a media mogul rated by Forbes magazine as India’s 15th-richest man. He happens also to be a strong supporter of the BJP.

Mr Chandra was lucky indeed. Voting rules for the Rajya Sabha require state assembly members to vote in turn, filling out ballots with a particular kind of pen and ink. For some reason no fewer than 13 Congress party members in the 90-seat Haryana assembly used a single pen with the wrong ink, rendering their votes invalid. The unfortunate Mr Anand contends that someone switched the pen in the balloting booth, causing him to lose.

Both the cash-for-votes sting and the iffy ink point to wider problems with the Rajya Sabha. India’s upper house is a powerful body. Even a prime minister as strong as Narendra Modi, who holds solid control of the Lok Sabha (lower house) has been unable to pass a goods-and-services tax, which economists see as crucial to India’s fiscal health. The slow pace of change in the composition of the Rajya Sabha means that Congress, despite its waning influence nationally, can still block the tax in the upper house, just as Mr Modi’s party blocked it when Congress was in power. India’s parliament under Mr Modi, who came into office in 2014, has introduced and passed far fewer bills than the previous two (see chart). The biggest impediment has been the Rajya Sabha.