T N Ninan: Encouraging the fringe

The anti-defection law has encouraged 'splits' and the creation of fringe parties

Bimal Jalan and other public-spirited individuals have set up a Public Interest Foundation, which is leading a pre-election campaign to keep criminals out of politics. Dr Jalan has another hobby-horse which figures in at least one of his books, and which is worth bringing up now—the unintended consequences of the anti-defection law of 1985. The argument is quite simple: the anti-defection law unseats all parliamentarians (and legislators) who desert the party on whose ticket they were elected. The exception is when a party splits—and a split is defined as at least one-third of the party’s representatives breaking away. What this does is to strengthen the hands of the party leadership, even as it ties down an elected representative who may be unhappy with his party for any reason.

The purpose of the law (other than to protect Rajiv Gandhi’s mammoth 403-seat base in the 1985 Lok Sabha) was to kill the ‘aaya ram – gaya ram’ defection problem that had erupted in 1967, when the Congress first went into decline, and then spread like a virus through the political spectrum. The unintended consequence that Dr Jalan points to is that this law, while discouraging defections, has encouraged ‘splits’ and the creation of fringe parties that are little more than the extended reach of single individuals—Ram Vilas Paswan’s Lok Janshakti Party, Ajit Singh’s Rashtriya Lok Dal, Bhajan Lal’s Haryana Janhit Congress, S Ramadoss’ Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK), HD Deve Gowda’s Janata Dal-Secular (JD-S), Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress, Vaiko’s Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (MDMK), Sharad Pawar’s Nationalist Congress Party, Om Parkash Chautala’s Indian National Lok Dal, and so on. All of these have a combined presence in the Lok Sabha that is barely 5 per cent of the total seats in the House.

Despite this miniscule presence, they are able to dominate pre-election alliance parleys and post-election deal-making. Most of them also happen to be breakaways from larger parties; if they had stayed with their parent parties, none of the leaders of these parties would have enjoyed the negotiating power or the media mileage that they now get (Ajit Singh, for instance, was able to negotiate with the Congress-led government to rename Lucknow airport after his father, and then allied with the BJP!). So if you had a small following of your own in any large party, based on caste or state or some other loyalty factor, you would be a fool to not break away and set up your own political tent. Indeed, it is this perverse incentive that has contributed to the shrinking of the Congress and the splintering of the Janata (the BJP, being more ideology-driven, has suffered less). The conclusion, inevitably, is that the anti-defection law has encouraged the creation of fringe parties, and in turn resulted in the dawn of the coalition era, as the umbrella parties have splintered.

Still, fringe parties are perforce obliged to strike deals, and they either team up with one of the principal parties or, as now, gang up to form a ‘third force’. But because of their lack of internal cohesiveness, the absence of any long-term cementing force and the inevitable clash of personalities, they tend to break up or fall in no more than one or two years—as the Janata did in 1979, the Janata Dal in 1990, and the United Front in 1998. More importantly, supporting a ‘third force’ government has frequently been the kiss of death for the main parties, because they get tarred with the non-performance brush. If the Congress supports the latest Third Front after the elections, expect the BJP to come roaring back in a couple of years.