Aug 16

The Anti-defection law

It is reported that former Secretary of Defence of USA, Forrestal, remarked that ‘You can no more divorce politics from government than you can seperate sex from creation’. Similarly, it can be said that policy making is intertwined with politics whether one likes it or not. Therefore it is imperative to study the impact of politics on government, especially if it is on the legislature, where laws of the nation are written and debated. 

One of the bigger problems plaguing the legislature in India (recently in Rajasthan and Manipur) is the practice of defection of members in the legislature from one party to another. To combat this, the parliament in 1985 passed the fifty-second amendment to the constitution containing the anti-defection law. The law provides that a member of the legislature will be disqualified if found guilty of defection. Although introduced with good intentions to safeguard the stability of governments, the law has led to further problems and is now in need of urgent reform. 

As per the law, defection can take place in two ways. One, if the member ‘voluntarily gives up’ membership of their political party or two, if they do not toe their party line in accordance with the party whip in the legislature. But a member could differ from the party line if they had obtained prior permission from the party. However such dissent is uncharacteristic of  Indian politics.

Even with these stringent restrictions, legislators changing political parties is a regular occurrence in Indian politics. Legislators have found ways to game the anti-defection law. Most legislators instead of ‘defecting’, resign and compete in the resultant bye-election representing a rival party. Even if the legislator is prosecuted further, a court cannot intervene until the speaker of the legislature has decided upon it and this is when the apex court is concerned with the ‘growing trend of Speakers acting against the constitutional duty of being neutral’.  

Therefore one can conclude that the anti-defection law has failed to do what it was intended to do. Instead it has severely damaged the legislative framework of the country through the help of the second type of defection mentioned above. It has stifled free speech and debates inside and outside the parliament. It has made legislators afraid of expressing their viewpoints on laws and policy issues in fear of reprisal by their own political parties. This system of mediocrity has helped sustain a vicious cycle of low expectations from legislators, low demand of intellectual legislators and low supply of intellectual legislators. 

The problem is not just one of specificities of how to twerk this specific legislation to combat defection but one of basic first principles- the inability of the system to record feedback and reform at regular intervals. This is in a way testament to the fact that good intentions does not always lead to good policy and for good policy there needs to be good politics. And for good politics to flourish, political reforms including the anti-defection reforms are sine qua non.   

-Benolin Kannadasan

History Lessons

With our 74th Independence Day just behind us, this would be a right time to ask ourselves the question: Do we know Indian History, truly?, not what we were taught in our schools from our partly accurate history books but the true, unpolished history. Nobody can know everything about our past struggles and the fight for independence but at least we can try to begin our search. 

However, with the limited knowledge that we possess, we start critiquing our past leaders without remorse. A personal or a popular opinion does not become a fact let alone history. Attacking a person’s action or idea without understanding their situation is absurd. Healthy criticisms come from knowing things, understanding people's mindsets. Ridiculing a person to romanticise another is not commendable. Half baked facts are more dangerous than whole lies. Love a person?, read more about them, spread the knowledge. Hate a person, do the same. Don’t drag people's name through mud just for the sake of it. 

The biggest challenge is today's world is to fight the onrush of misinformation, wrapped in political and religious propaganda. Fact checking has become a thing of yore. A false information forwarded a hundred times becomes a fact. Nobody thinks twice before insulting a freedom fighter, because they seem to know a lot about him/her through unfounded information circulating in the web. The struggle for Independence in the early twentieth century may not seem so glamorous in the present but that was necessary and every single person who was involved in the Independence movement was an important cog in the wheel. No one has to be eliminated from the grand scheme of things. 

Let us all try to learn more about our history before we say “Happy Independence Day” for the 75th time.

-Gautham Selvarajan