As the Parliament’s monsoon session staggers from adjournment to adjournment, another drama, perhaps a more interesting one, is playing out just a few metres away. 

It’s the run-up to the elections of the Constitution Club of India, an affair usually as unremarkable as a sarkari formality, with the administrative body winning without so much as a murmur of opposition. The club isn’t a Delhi Gymkhana, a Roshanara, or Chelmsford. What sets it apart is its membership list – sitting and former MPs only.

But this year is different. 

The club maintained the usual active facade on Wednesday: a report release here, an AI roundtable there, and a compound full of Lok Janshakti Party workers surrounding MP Chirag Paswan after a party meet. But beneath the routine, political leaders were busy in their own mini campaigns within the political corridors, quietly calculating support and convincing members to vote for their candidates for the election set to take place on August 12. 

After 25 years of unchallenged rule, the governing order faces a challenge, and not from anyone else, but from one of its own, transforming a low-key affair into an all-out BJP versus BJP contest. At the centre of it are two former union ministers, Rajiv Pratap Rudy and Sanjeev Balyan, locked in a fight for the secretary (administration) post.

The two contenders share little in common beyond the party banner they stand beneath. For one is the very picture of Lutyen Delhi’s suavity, a commercial pilot by training, polished, reflective of a Bihari-elite in the capital. The other, by contrast, is a Jat neta from the sugarcane belt of western Uttar Pradesh, a rural strongman rugged in style, now seeking to take over a club just a stone’s throw away from the new Parliament building. 

Their differences, and the alliances they have built, hint at deeper faultlines that have turned a mere club election into a mini-reflection of the larger conflict within the ruling party. 

As with nearly any development that echoes through the corridors of power, this one too is rife with the usual brew of gossip, strategic mythmaking, personal rivalries and seemingly high-stakes maneuvering across party lines. Which is why it comes as no surprise that this election too is pitched as a proxy fight between the second most powerful politician in the country and a strongman chief minister of the same party.

The peculiar contest, scheduled for Tuesday, will be decided by the votes of over 1,200 eligible members, an electoral roll that includes the who’s who of Indian politics: from Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah to Congress leaders Sonia Gandhi and Mallikarjun Kharge. 

A few governing council posts like the secretary (sports) and secretary