New Delhi, Sept. 1 -- In June, several developments were observed in relation to political defection in India, which can make a great case for academic research for political scientists in the future. In West Bengal, 19 rebel Trinamool Congress Lok Sabha MPs, led by former party chief whip Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar and veteran parliamentarian Sudip Bandyopadhyay, walked into Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla's office on June 14 and announced their merger with the Nationalist Citizens Party of India, a registered but little-known outfit from Tripura with no meaningful presence in national politics. In Maharashtra, six of Shiv Sena (Uddhav Thackeray)'s nine Lok Sabha MPs skipped a "three-line party whip" meeting on June 18 and submitted a letter to the Speaker seeking a merger with Eknath Shinde's Shiv Sena, with a formal announcement expected by June 20. Two parties, two States, one template.
The Anti-Defection Law, contained in the Tenth Schedule of the Indian Constitution, was enacted with the intention of tackling the problem of constant political defections within India. The law, however, was passed in haste, rushed through the two Houses, and lacked any national consensus. It left some major vacuums, which allowed the judiciary to tweak the law to suit varying societal temperaments. Paragraph (6) of the Schedule grants wide powers to the Chairman or the Speaker of a House to decide questions of disqualification on grounds of defection, without prescribing any deadline for a decision. Judicial interpretation has vested the Speaker with sole and supreme authority to decide the question of disqualification. Beginning in 1992 with the majority opinion in Kihoto Hollohon v. Zachilhu and Ors. (1992), which also made the Speaker's decision amenable to judicial review, his authority has been reaffirmed in Ravi S. Naik v. UOI (1994), Rajendra Singh Rana v. Swami Prasad Maurya (2007) and Subhash Desai v. Principal Secretary (2023).
These things lead to two problems: first, the vague 'merger' exemption coupled with the finality of the Speaker's decision; and second, the absence of a deadline for the Chairman/Speaker to decide on disqualification petitions. The text of the Schedule is silent on how these two situations must be interpreted, leaving space for judicial interpretation, which has widened, rather than bridged, the vacuum between the law's letter and its actual impact.
The solutions to these problems are not unknown. The Law Commission's 170th Report of 1999 explicitly recommended transferring adjudicatory authority from the Speaker to an independent tribunal, which had been recommended by the Dinesh Goswami Committee nearly a decade earlier, in 1990, and was reaffirmed by the National Commission to Review the Working of the Constitution in 2002. None of it became law. An independent constitutional tribunal for defection cases, mandatory intra-party elections with public disclosure of party finances, and a clear constitutional bar on defectors holding ministerial office for the remainder of their term are not radical proposals but some of the ideas that need to be implemented for our democracy to sustain and thrive and to protect it from external forces that are becoming a threat to it.
The reasoning of morality given by these opposition leaders after leaving their parties and defecting to the BJP also needs to be debunked. The AAP members who crossed over to the BJP in April 2026, the Trinamool MPs who just discovered their conscience recently following their previous party's election defeat, and the Congress legislators who discovered theirs in Madhya Pradesh in 2020 all invoked an inability to remain within parties "touched by corruption". If the grievance is genuine criminality, the prescribed remedy in a constitutional democracy is the courts, the electorate, or a competing political platform. A morality-based reasoning that leads towards the ruling dispensation is not morality. It is just them being opportunistic to make sure they accrue all the benefits one gets from being cosy with the establishment.
India first confronted this problem in 1967, when Gaya Lal, an MLA from Hassanpur in Haryana, switched parties three times within a fortnight, twice within a nine-hour span, and gave rise to the political phrase "Aaya Ram, Gaya Ram" (Ram came, Ram went). Parliament's institutional response, 18 years later, was the Tenth Schedule. The law was meant to end the game. Instead, several tricks, in the form of loopholes, were found in this game of political defection. The electorate deserves a legislature that finally addresses these loopholes.
Views expressed are personal. The writer is a law student
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from Millennium Post.