West Bengal & Rajasthan: Two extremes of the anti-defection law

In Rajasthan, the Speaker desired to initiate action even before the rebel legislators acted against the party inside the Assembly, while in Bengal no action is ever taken

Of late, the anti-defection law has become the subject of a major controversy, thanks to developments in Rajasthan. The experts are divided, so are the columnists and the common man.

The bitter truth, however, is that the law, since its inception, has been interpreted by Speakers in a way that is suitable to the party that they belong to. Ironically, like other legislators or Parliamentarians, Speakers too are dependent on the whims of the party leaders, and cannot use their own conscience to decide on matters. If someone tries to act independently, like Somnath Chattehrjee (the Speaker of Lok Sabha from 2004-2009), they are destined for political oblivion.

That is why we still do not have an instrument that can balance between honest dissent and dishonest ‘aya ram, gaya ram’ politics. In a wider sense, we need a law that will seek balance between conscience and greed. What we have today is a law that is insufficient, ineffective, and unproductive.

If we consider the example of Bengal, things will come clear. In Bengal, many legislators have crossed over to other parties in the last ten years, but none of them have faced any action. Thus Bengal and Rajasthan assemblies stand at two opposite poles. In Rajasthan, the Speaker desired to initiate action even before the rebel legislators, under the aegis of Sachin Pilot acted against the party inside the legislature, while in Bengal no action is ever taken, despite the MLAs' flagrant violation of the will of the electorate.

The Bengal scenario

This new trend in Bengal was started by the Trinamool Congress (TMC) after it made history by ending the 34-year-long run of the Left in 2011. This was in alliance with the Congress, but soon after, the Congress broke away. Even then TMC had a solid majority (184 in an assembly of 294 members) in the house. But it started luring the opposition MLAs to its fold. By the middle of 2014, when it had completed three years in power, altogether 13 MLAs from different Opposition parties like the Congress, Forward Bloc, RSP and CPI(M) left their mother parties and formally joined TMC. Ironically, the main engineer of this process was Mukul Roy who is in the BJP now.

Some more legislators joined the TMC between mid-2014 and the next Assembly election in May 2016. None of them faced any action despite their mother parties’ complaint to the Speaker.

After the 2016 election, it was assumed that the game would end. But it was not so. Mamata Banerjee’s TMC had 211 seats out of 294, but the party continued to take MLAs of other Opposition parties. The trend summarily changed before and after the 2019 Loksabha elections, when three TMC legislators joined the BJP and fought Lok Sabha elections. Since then six other MLAs crossed over from other parties, including TMC, to the BJP, though not all of them are with the Saffron party now.

However Biman Banerjee, the Speaker of the Assembly, has not acted even against the TMC deserters. The TMC leadership was not keen to disqualify them either, probably because it would have given Opposition partiess reason to go to the court to seek action against their MLAs too. Now there is fresh speculation about the possibility of a large number of TMC MLAs leaving the party (to bring down the government so that election is held under President’s rule). If it ever becomes the reality, it will be interesting to observe whether the Speaker tries to thwart it using the Rajasthan model.

The moot question

The moot question about the law is whether it can be made immune to the whims of the political leadership of the parties. In an ideal democracy, the people’s representatives should be free from having to follow a whip so that they can act according to their conscience. Take the case of a debatable law on a disputed subject like the NRC (National Register of Citizenship). Ideally, every single MP should have the freedom to decide on it according to her/his conscience and the wishes of the people who elected her or him. That is the ideal situation.

But in reality, the ideal is most often marred by the corrupting influences of different kinds. So we also need to defeat amoral ‘aya ram gaya’ ram politics.

The system has failed us so far in being able to strike an ideal balance. In the early 90s, when far less than one-third of the MPs (the required strength then to make a split valid) broke away from the Janata Dal to vote for the PV Narasimha Rao government, Lok Sabha Speaker Shivraj Patil waited for months to decide on the case. Over the next few months more MPs joined the splinter group, and when it achieved the required number, Patil declared the split valid, arguing that the ‘split is a continuous process’. Thereafter, many Speakers have played with the law in a similar way. The BJP has now emerged as more notorious than the Congress in foul play.

Decades have passed like this, and we have not been able to strike the balance between conscience and greed.

(Diptendra Raychaudhuri is a Kolkata-based journalist and author of books including, A Naxal Story. He is a deputy editor at the Bengali daily, Aajkal)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author’s own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.