71^st BPSC Mains

Approach: Provide a short description of the Tenth Schedule introduced to curb instability. In the body, explain its misuse: mass resignations, speaker bias, merger loophole. Conclude by suggesting reforms for neutrality and internal democracy.

Answer: The Anti-Defection Law, enacted in 1985 through the 52nd Amendment (Tenth Schedule), was intended to curb the pervasive practice of ‘Aaya Ram, Gaya Ram’ politics, which destabilized governments through frequent and arbitrary defections (“horse-trading”). While the law successfully promoted government stability and party discipline, its operational reality suggests it is increasingly defeating its original purpose by producing unintended and adverse consequences on parliamentary democracy.

Purpose Achieved

The law did successfully fulfil its primary goals:

• Government Stability: The law largely curtailed individual defections for ministerial berths or money, significantly reducing the instability that plagued state governments in the 1970s and 1980s.
• Preservation of Mandate: By ensuring that members (MLAs/MPs) adhere to the party platform they were elected on, the law reinforces the collective mandate given by the voters, as upheld in the landmark Kihoto Hollohan case (1992).
• Curbing Horse-Trading: It successfully discouraged simple ‘buying and selling’ of individual legislators by making such actions result in immediate disqualification.

Ways the Law is Defeating its Purpose

Despite its success in preventing small-scale defection, the law has introduced new, more damaging challenges:

• Curbing Intra-Party Democracy and Dissent: The law has been criticized for converting a legislator’s role from a representative of constituents into a mere voting machine for the party high command. The stringent provision against voting contrary to the party ‘whip’ infringes on the freedom of the member to follow their conscience or represent specific constituency interests that might diverge from the party line.
• Legalizing Mass Defection (Merger Loophole): The provision exempting disqualification during a ‘merger’ (requiring two-thirds of members to agree) has been widely exploited. Instead of individual defection, large-scale splits are engineered (e.g., Operation Kamala) where two-thirds of the party unit move to form or join another party, thereby institutionalizing defection and validating the very ‘horse-trading’ the law sought to prevent.
• Controversial Role of the Speaker: The law assigns the power of adjudication solely to the Speaker/Chairman, an office often occupied by a partisan political nominee. Delays and bias in the Speaker’s decision-making process (often taking months or years) have led to concerns about judicial oversight and the fairness of the process.
• Undermining Representative Democracy: The law reinforces the dominance of party leadership, making legislators accountable more to the party bosses than to the electorate, thereby weakening the accountability inherent in representative democracy.

Conclusion

The Anti-Defection Law, while achieving stability, has inadvertently undermined a legislator’s role as an independent deliberator, empowering party leadership at the expense of parliamentary debate and constituent representation. The solution lies not in abolishing the law but in reforming it. Recommendations from the 2nd ARC and legal experts suggest that the power to decide disqualification should be transferred from the Speaker to an independent authority, such as the President/Governor acting on the binding advice of the ECI. This reform would address the procedural bias while retaining the law’s core intent—preserving the integrity of the mandate and the stability of the government.