​Gang of seven: On the AAP defections

On April 24, seven of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP)’s 10 Rajya Sabha members announced their merger with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The Rajya Sabha Chairman has accepted their claim of merger, raising the BJP’s strength in the Upper House to 113 and the combined strength of the National Democratic Alliance above the halfway mark for the first time. The episode highlights the nature of AAP, the crass opportunism of the turncoats, the machinations of the BJP, and the institutionalised defanging of the anti-defection law. Of the seven, Raghav Chadha, Sandeep Pathak and Swati Maliwal were part of AAP in an organic manner, to the limited extent that it had an identity beyond the whims of its founder, Arvind Kejriwal. For the other four, their exit is as opportunistic as their entries into AAP were. Mr. Kejriwal used to taunt the Congress for losing its legislators to the BJP in several States, as symptomatic of the erosion of its ethical responsibility. But a relentless campaign of anarchy in pursuit of power exposed the true character of AAP as a far cry from its grand claims. The disintegration of its Rajya Sabha contingent is the culmination of the cynicism and opportunism on which AAP thrived, imposing a heavy cost on the democratic institutions of India. It reaped what it sowed.

That is no reason to ignore the brazen misinterpretation — invoked by the gang of seven and accepted by the Chairman of the Rajya Sabha — of the Tenth Schedule of the Constitution, which bars the defection of elected representatives from their original party. The merger exception in the Schedule is clear that a party can merge with another, subject to the concurrence of two-thirds of its legislators. In 2023, the Supreme Court of India elaborated that the legislature party cannot dictate the course of the political party, and the two cannot be conflated. Two-thirds of the members of the legislature party of the original party must accept a merger for it to be valid under the anti-defection law. To turn this around and argue that two-thirds of a party’s legislative members can cross over to another party without attracting disqualification is a stretch, and is being challenged in the Court by AAP. The Court’s past interventions on similar developments are less than reassuring, sadly. Elected governments have been unseated on the back of large-scale defections, rendering the Tenth Schedule impotent in the recent past. That the Court could not set any deterrence to this open betrayal of popular mandates is borne out by the fact that such acts are being repeated with impunity.