The decision by seven of the Aam Admi Party’s 10 Rajya Sabha members to join the Bharatiya Janata Party shows that the political experiment led by Arvind Kejriwal is imploding bit by bit. The shadow of this development is likely to fall on Punjab, where assembly elections are due in 2027. It is the state which sent most of the seven MPs who chose to switch sides. The BJP will now use their services to bolster its support base in Punjab. Currently, on the face of it, the AAP holds a commanding majority in Punjab, forming the government in 2022 with 92 out of 117 seats, with Bhagwant Mann as chief minister. As of today, the party is experiencing internal turmoil, with reports suggesting potential defections following senior leader Raghav Chadha's exit, amid allegations of ‘back-stabbing’ and attempts to destabilise the government.
At one stage, the AAP experiment carried much promise once and caught the imagination of most countrymen. The politics of AAP was people-centric, neither leftist nor capitalist. However, as time passed, Kejriwal tried to spread his wings to states like Punjab, Gujarat, Haryana and Goa. This came at the expense of the discredited Congress party. It also turned out to be an over-reach as the party neither had the cadres nor the support in most of these states. Then came his downfall in Delhi. After that, the BJP dispensation spared no effort to discredit him, even putting several of the top AAP leaders behind bars. The APP is now left with one stronghold, Punjab, and it is a matter of time before the party begins to face a meltdown there, too.
Machinations of BJP
The episode highlights the centralised nature of AAP, the crass opportunism of the turncoats, the machinations of the BJP to marginalise its political opponents and the institutionalised defanging of the anti-defection law. Of the seven, Raghav Chadha, Sandeep Pathak and Swati Maliwal were at one point in time part of AAP in an organic manner, to the limited extent that it had an identity beyond the whims of Kejriwal. For the other four, their exit is as opportunistic as their entries into AAP were.
The Rajya Sabha chairman has accepted the claim of merger of the seven breakaway MPs with the BJP, 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. However, this contrived majority does the BJP no good and robs it of whatever moral sheen it had.
Kejriwal used to taunt the Congress for losing its legislators to the BJP in several states, saying that it was symptomatic of the erosion of its ethical responsibility. Now, he is facing criticism on this count. Besides, a relentless campaign of anarchy in pursuit of power exposed the true character of AAP as a far cry from its grand claims.
In 2023, the Supreme Court of India held that the legislative party cannot dictate the course of the political party, and that the two cannot be conflated
“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,” says Jairam Ramesh, the Congress spokesman. “It reaped what it sowed”.
Some political observers have pointed to the brazen misinterpretation – invoked by the seven MPs and accepted by the Chairman of the Rajya Sabha – of the Xth 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 held that the legislative party cannot dictate the course of the political party, and that 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. They say that 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. The AAP is challenging the crossover in court on these grounds.
However, the Court’s past interventions on similar developments are less than reassuring, sadly, point out other observers. Elected governments have been unseated on the back of large-scale defections, rendering the Xth 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.