Defection as merger: On politics, the wave of defections

📌 Summary:

• A wave of defections is sweeping India's elected representatives, MPs chief among them; latest episode: six Shiv Sena (UBT) Lok Sabha MPs seek to join the Eknath Shinde faction
• This group is exactly two-thirds of the party's Lok Sabha strength, so they claim their crossover is a "merger" under the Tenth Schedule (anti-defection law), which escapes disqualification
• Tenth Schedule mechanism: a member can be disqualified for voluntarily resigning from the party or defying a party whip during a House division
• The 2003 amendment removed the earlier "split" provision (which let one-third of a party defect without penalty) and retained ONLY the "merger" exception — no disqualification if two-thirds of legislators agree to merge with another party
• Engineered splits are now dressed up as mergers; legal validity is contested — the Supreme Court has held a merger cannot be of the legislature party alone and must involve the parent party too
• Presiding officers keep clearing such stretched claims while the SC holds back judgments on related constitutional questions, making the Tenth Schedule "redundant and irrelevant"
• Pattern repeats: TMC rebellion (a rebel group claiming 20 of TMC's 28 LS MPs, led by Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar, aligning with the NDA); in April AAP Rajya Sabha MPs joined the BJP, cutting AAP's RS strength from 10 to three; three TMC RS members resigned
• Cumulative effect: rising NDA strength in both Houses; the NDA still lacks the two-thirds majority needed to pass constitutional amendments
• Core argument: the two-thirds threshold for amendments is deliberately high to ensure wide political consensus; bypassing that intent through "defections-as-mergers" is an affront to representative democracy and the spirit of the Constitution

🎯 UPSC Relevance: GS2 — anti-defection law, Tenth Schedule, discretion of presiding officers, party system and representative democracy.

📝 Prelims Facts:

• Anti-defection law is the Tenth Schedule, inserted by the 52nd Amendment (1985)
• The "split" provision (one-third) was deleted by the 91st Amendment (2003), leaving only the two-thirds "merger" exception
• Constitutional amendments require a special (two-thirds) majority in Parliament

🔑 Key Term: Tenth Schedule (Anti-Defection Law) — disqualifies legislators for defection, with an exception for genuine mergers backed by two-thirds of a party's members.