Bhubaneswar, March 20 -- Six Biju Janata Dal (BJD) legislators who were slapped with show-cause notices for supporting independent candidate Dilip Ray in the March 16 Rajya Sabha elections have called the notices "illegal, arbitrary, baseless, and unconstitutional" and threatened criminal proceedings

BJD chief whip Pramila Mallick on March 17 issued notices to six MLAs -- Chakramani Kanhar (Baliguda), Naba Kishore Mallick (Jayadev), Souvic Biswal (Choudwar-Cuttack), Subasini Jena (Basta), Ramakanta Bhoi (Tirtol), and Devi Ranjan Tripathy (Banki) -- after they backed the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) supported independent candidate Dilip Ray instead of the BJD-Congress joint candidate, urologist Datteswar Hota.

In the end, the BJP won two...