: Opinion: Amend anti-defection law #IndiaNEWS #News By Arun Sinha In a recent address at Bengaluru, Vice-President Venkaiah Naidu lamented that the anti-defection law had failed to check mass defections

@IndiaNEWS

Posted in: #IndiaNEWS

Opinion: Amend anti-defection law #IndiaNEWS #News
By Arun Sinha
In a recent address at Bengaluru, Vice-President Venkaiah Naidu lamented that the anti-defection law had failed to check mass defections and suggested an amendment to the law to stop it. The lamentation and suggestion coming from someone who had been the BJP president sound bold, as several mass defections in recent years have been engineered by the party. However, Naidu was speaking there not as a BJP man but as Vice-President and his observation does not apply to one party. And indeed, why blame the BJP alone? Given their time, all parties have trampled the anti-defection law under their feet.
The central flaw in the anti-defection law has been the assignment of total authority to the Speaker to decide on the petition. All political parties have used the Speaker as a weapon to defeat the law. In theory, an MLA or an MP, after being elected as Speaker (presiding officer of the House), ceases to be partisan. In practice, they remain partisan. They do the bidding of the top leadership of the party they belong to.
Speaker’s Role
The party leadership usually wants the Speaker to sit over the disqualification petition till the term of the House is over. That helps the leadership kill the petition without looking like having done so, because the case is not carried on to a House. The Speaker adroitly follows the party leadership’s brief by giving long dates of hearing and stretching on issues of procedure and evidence.
Nobody can question the Speaker. The petitioners and the aggrieved political party in opposition have to put up with his naked partiality. Even the judiciary cannot question the Speaker, because the law does not allow it to interfere with the case prior to the making of the decision by the Speaker. That has allowed the party leadership to reward the defectors immediately with offices of power and help them enjoy it till the end of the term of the house.
Shyamkumar Singh’s Case
The anti-defection law, referred to as the Tenth Schedule, was added to the Constitution through the Fifty Second (Amendment) Act, 1985. For 35 years since then, the Speakers colluded with their party leaderships to stretch the proceedings in disqualification cases to defeat the purposes of the law, without the fear of the judiciary intervening to set a time for their decision. However, it changed in early 2020 with Thounaojam Shyamkumar Singh’s case.
Thounaojam Shyamkumar Singh was elected as an MLA on a Congress ticket in Manipur in 2017. Immediately after his election, he defected to the BJP and was rewarded by the party with a Cabinet berth with several portfolios — town planning and forest and environment and horticulture and soil conservation.

Intraday stocks under 50 NSE India Twitter of India

Vote Up Vote Down

Login to post a comment!