Direction: Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions given below.

With the big 2019 election just eight months away, Prime Minister Narendra Modi worked the phone to win over Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik - his nine MPs - for today's big test in the Rajya Sabha. The "united opposition" was exposed as a shabby group once again - the NDA's candidate, Harivansh Narayan Singh, who is a parliamentarian from the party of Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, won the election for Rajya Sabha Deputy Chairman 125-105. The opposition in parliament is a vivid depiction of the gang that could not shoot straight. After his show-stopping hug of Modi a few weeks ago, Congress President Rahul Gandhi appears to have reverted to ho-hum mode. He chose the lacklustre BK Hariprasad as the opposition candidate at the last minute. And for all Gandhi's talk of being willing to move the Congress to the backseat if that's what it will take to win over parties that don't like it (the YSR Congress, for example), he did the opposite. By forcing a Congress nominee as the opposition's candidate, the TRS, which had been lobbied hard by the BJP, voted for the BJP - exactly what Modi and Shah were hoping for. If the Congress strategists possessed some political smarts, they could have reached out to Naveen Patnaik and offered support to a BJD candidate. This would have cemented a new alliance and robbed other opposition parties of excuses of not voting for a Congress candidate. Supposedly, K Chandrasekhar Rao or KCR, the Chief Minister of Telangana, expected a call from Gandhi seeking his support - that never happened. That may be a fig leaf given that KCR is showing every sign of siding with Modi in general. But Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal also cited the silence from Gandhi as the reason for his three Aam Aadmi MPs abstaining. All this meant that the NDA candidate needed far fewer votes to win. Gandhi's current refusal to engage with leaders like Kejriwal will hurt his own party's place in the anti-Modi alliance as other leaders in this group including front-liner Mamata Banerjee, who is very fond of her agitprop Delhi counterpart, will simply not accept the cold-shouldering. The reality is that AAP is here to stay and the seven Delhi Lok Sabha seats will have to be divvied up to allocate some to Team Kejriwal whether the Congress likes it or not.