In 2009, four members of British Parliament's upper house — the House of Lords — were accused of accepting bribes to introduce motions for amendments that would have helped change the law to benefit a Chinese businessman wanting to expand a chain of stores in the country. Later, it was found out that the 'Chinese businessman' was a front for another party and was completely fictitious. A sting operation carried by a newspaper shook the nation and two of accused members were suspended in the fallout. All the four members were peers from the Labour party. Since then, the demand for reforms in the British upper house has only grown stronger.

India, after independence, adopted Britain's Westminister model of government tweaking it a little and dropping the appointment of members to the upper house of Rajya Sabha (except for 12 seats). Rather, the members of state and union territory assemblies were to elect these members from a list of candidates fileded by political parties. The founding fathers of our constitution could have thought that this was a more representative, more transparent way than the British way of appointment by favour of the monarch. It truned out to be neither. Today, there is large scale horse trading in the Rajya Sabha elections and representation of people has gone for a toss. The recent Anshuman Mishra fiasco reeks of the rot that RS nominations have become.

Anshuman Mishra, a London-based businessman (or so he claims), had filed for nomination for the RS seat from BJP-ruled Jharkhand. Mishra had filed as an independent — yet there was a queue of state BJP leaders to endorse his nomination. BJP leader and former union minister Yashwant Sinha immediately raised a flag saying that the party should have fielded a worker or a state leader and Mishra's nomination amounted to an "auction of the Rajya Sabha ticket".

Sinha’s protest forced Mishra to withdraw his nomination. Jilted, Mishra wouldn't back down without some mud-slinging at BJP biggies — from L K Advani right down to Arun Jaitley, Murli Manohar Joshi and Suhma Swaraj. He accused Swaraj and Jaitley of having received favours from him. When the leader of opposition in the Rajya Sabha, Arun Jaitley, filed a defamation notice aganist Mishra on Monday, he quickly apologised.

We have to thank Mishra for unwittingly exposing what the RS elections now threaten to become. His back story is a symptom of all that is wrong with them.

Mishra, barely known to many outside 11, Ashoka Road (the BJP headquarters in Delhi) before the fiasco, has claimed to be a fund-raiser for the party. Over the last decade, Mishra made many visits to senior BJP leaders in attampts to forge acquaintances with them. In the process, not only did he get unfettered access to the top brass of the party but also mnade acquaintances in the Sangh Parivar's ideological outfit, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). These RSS links helped him to get in touch with Nitin Gadkari, the party president.

These links with the party's top brass and money helped the NRI businessman file the nomination for RS from Jharkhand. This left S S Ahluwalia, senior BJP leader in the RS, in the lurch as Jharkhand refused to nominate him. He had to retire from the upper house to make way for the 37-year-old 'independent'. Mishra claimed to have Gadkari's blessings for this.

Mishra also claims to have worked as a lobbyist in the US for the party after the 1998 Pokhran test.

However, the businessman/lobbyist/fundraiser/independent is not just an aberration. He is a symptom of a deeper malaise that currently affects BJP the most acutely. The party's always on the look out for the wheeler-dealer types to fill its coffers.

This is not for the first time in the past couple of years that the party is in news for the wrong reasons — from porn-watching ministers to mining scams. But has the party learnt any lessons?

No clean up followed the Mishra drama, no formal announcements were made by the party. Unlike the British Labour party which launched a massive overhaul to clean up its ranks,  BJP did not even order a probe into Mishra's nomination!