The wrong ink

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.