Ahmed Patel, whom the Congress considers its pillar (because the party’s president Sonia Patel, we are told, seeks his counsel whenever she is in some doubt) will stay on in the Rajya Sabha for a fifth term. He won the election only because two of his party’s MLAs found it necessary to prove before Amit Shah that they had rebelled against the party from which they were elected to the state assembly in 2012. Recall the camera with exposed film rolls inside it on the fateful night on May 21, 1991 in Sriperumbudur that helped investigators track down Sivarasan and the subsequent trail leading to the capture of Rajiv Gandhi’s assassins. Well, the killers seemed to have been under compulsion to show evidence to their masters that they did indeed do the deed as it seems to have been with the two Congress MLAs who showed their ballot papers, duly stamped, to the BJP president and, thus, ended up helping the Congress candidate win.

In the system of single transferable vote that guides election to the Rajya Sabha, the two votes that were invalidated by the Election Commission, past midnight, did not mean two less for the Congress’ rebel candidate to whom they had cast their votes. It brought down the number of valid votes from 174 to 172 and thus the quota required by anyone to win ended up at 44, the votes Patel secured even after many MLAs from his party ended up voting against the whip. If valid votes are 174 then quota would have been 44.5; Patel, in that case would have been left behind with just 44 and the surplus votes secured by Shah and Smriti Irani (1.5 each and adding up to 3) should have been distributed, which would have landed in the Congress rebel’s kitty; but that too would have added up to only 43 and short of 44.5.

Let me not waste time and energy on such a discussion with ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’. The fact is Ahmed Patel won; the rebels from his party-almost a dozen including the two who displayed their disloyalty and insisted on proving that they were defectors beyond doubt, will after due procedure established by law (the Tenth Schedule of the Constitution of India, in this case) will be disqualified as MLAs. They knew this as much as a child knows the need to cry for milk!

They also knew that the Gujarat Assembly term will end even before the procedure established by law will be completed and they are disqualified. They knew that elections to the state assembly are due in November 2017 and only a couple of months or more left. They also knew that the law does not prohibit them from contesting as BJP candidates (after having been Congress MLAs for four years and 10 months and disqualified at the far end of the five-year term).

They knew their shift of loyalty was also preservational. Shankersinh Vaghela, after all, was with the BJP and spent long years with the RSS and yet could find for himself a berth in the Union Cabinet after joining the Congress! The late Charan Singh, after all, had managed to become Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh in April 1967, just a month after he and his followers in the Uttar Pradesh Congress Legislature Party had affirmed support to the Congress Chief Minister, Chandra Banu Gupta, with support from the Socialists and the Bharatiya Jan Sangh, against whom he and his followers had fought and won the elections in March 1967.

Charan Singh, in a few days before he was sworn in as Chief Minister in April 1967, had negotiated with Indira Gandhi’s aides in one room of his house and with those from the Socialist-Jan Sangh alliance in another simultaneously. And from there, he mastered the art of shifting allegiance between the Congress and the opposition several times and did make it as Prime Minister of India between July 28, 1979 and January 14, 1980; never mind he was only care-taker Prime Minister for the five months and few days that he occupied the office of the Prime Minister. His son, Ajit Singh, inherited this legacy in the truest sense. It is difficult to find any political party or combination in the wide spectrum that we have in our times with which Ajit Singh has not been associated in his tryst with politics, was installed in the party by his father before his death in May 1987 and had walked in and out of almost all political formations since then.

In an India where the political discourse was filled with such shifts, and pronounced thusly since March 1967-the elections when the Congress lost power in nine states and also in Uttar Pradesh a month later (when Charan Singh showed his willingness to go any extent to become Chief Minister) and in the chaos that marked politics in UP as also in Bihar and Haryana, the Congress was the big player and Sonia Gandhi’s mother-in-law was brazen doing what Amit Shah and his party had done in Goa and Manipur and had tried to do in Gujarat on August 8, 2017: Organise defections, make it appear as rebellion and wrest power by such means.

But then, the Constitution of India had only nine schedules attached to it. It is worth recalling that when the Draft Constitution was introduced for consideration and approval by the Constituent Assembly, as late as in July 1949, just a few months before the Assembly adopted the Constitution on November 26, 1949, it contained only seven schedules. The Eighth Schedule listing out 16 languages (and subsequently amended twice to make it 22) was added to the Constitution only during the far end of the Constituent Assembly’s life and the Ninth Schedule was added by the Constitution (First Amendment) Act, 1951.  Adding the two Schedules to the Constitution – the Eighth and the Ninth – were held as consistent with the Idea of India, that the nation shall be built on equal status to the many languages that its people spoke rather than imposing Hindi on people who spoke other languages (the Eighth Schedule) and to restrict the scope of the Right to Property as Fundamental Right (Article 31 and inserting Article 31 B thereafter), positive discrimination towards the SCs, STs and the OBCs (by way of Article 15 (4)) and some additions to Article 19 and 29, all of which were done through the First Amendment seemed to have taken care of the problems that appeared in working the democratic Constitution.

It was presumed then and for long that the nation was safe with just the nine schedules and the party system that is central to the democratic edifice was strong enough to hold it. The Congress did not have problems with this in the 1950s when there was no opposition strong enough to challenge its position as the natural choice across India. An aberration in Kerala, when the Communists won elections in 1957 was taken care by way of Article 356 by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and he did that to please his daughter and then-president of his party, Indira Gandhi. The 1960s were different. In the height of anti-Congress consolidation, Indira used Article 356 as much as she organised defections from opposition stables rendering elected MLAs into horses to be sold and bought in the market. The difference, however, is that horses, like slaves in antiquity, did not have any role in themselves being sold and purchased, the trading now involved the MLAs offering themselves for sale and getting richer out of such trade! It is worth considering another term, horse-trading that is now common in our discourse involving the amoral business of shifting loyalties among elected representatives.

Indira took this business to new heights when she let her party operators toppled NT Rama Rao as Chief Minister on August 16, 1984; it was a stealthy operation in all sense. The Congress got N Bhaskar Rao, who had joined NTR’s party after having spent long years in the Congress, to organise a signature campaign among the TDP MLAs praising NTR and his leadership, replaced the covering letter later with one stating withdrawal of support to NTR and appending the additional sheets to the covering letter thus making it as a memorandum of no-confidence and the Governor, Ram Lal (an old Congressman from Himachal Pradesh) acting with élan to dismiss NTR. The project failed after TDP MLAs were held captive by NTR’s son-in-law, N Chandrababu Naidu and paraded everywhere and Bhaskar Rao had to quit and NTR was re-installed as Chief Minister.

These were possible all the while and when the Constitution was amended for the 52^nd time in 1985 and the Tenth Schedule was added to the Constitution of India, it was peddled as the panacea to such politics of aya rams and gaya rams. The fact is that Rajiv Gandhi, now at the helm of the Congress as well as the nation, brought this into the Constitution for reasons that were different from the perception that it was meant to cleanse the political stable of persons willing to sell themselves and betray their own party for a few silver coins as did Jesus’ disciples. Let me stress that the few is not the proper word and silver is just a metaphor. The Constitution (Fifty Second Amendment) Act, 1985 was the outcome of Rajiv Gandhi’s apprehensions that his own MPs were likely to revolt and unseat him and something had to be done to stop that. The Anti-Defection law, which is what the Tenth Schedule is all about, was made to serve this end.

The law, as it stood, was manipulated by the Congress again when a revolt was brewing in the Janata Dal. The Janata Dal parliamentary party could be ‘split’ with the MPs not attracting the disqualification from Parliament where they could add up to one-third of the party’s strength in the Lok Sabha. The catch was that the Speaker of the Lok Sabha was the one to decide and declare disqualifications under the law. And Rabi Ray, who was then the Speaker, refused to play ball and the defectors were categorised in different stages (based on the dates when they defied the party they belonged to) and thus declared a number of them, already holding positions in the Congress-supported government headed by Chandrashekhar, disqualified as MPs. The VP Singh ministry would have fallen even otherwise and it fell thanks to such machinations by the Congress, under Rajiv Gandhi who was the father of the Tenth Schedule, abusing the law.

And then there was the amendment to the schedule in 2003; the Constitution (Ninety First Amendment) Act, 2003 deleting the provision that defection of at least one third of a party’s legislators will not attract disqualification. This then means that all those twelve MLAs in Gujarat who voted against Ahmed Patel, the party’s nominee, are liable to be disqualified if the Congress decided to take it up before the Assembly Speaker and seek their disqualification. But then, this was possible only after they defied the whip and acted against the party’s decision as laid down under Section 2 (b) of the Tenth Schedule: Disqualification on grounds of defection is subject to the legislator ‘votes or abstains from voting in such House contrary to any direction by the party to which he belongs…’. The trouble is the consequence of such voting, rather than effect of such voting, such as the survival or the fall of a government or the election or the defeat of the party’s candidate to the Rajya Sabha or any other office, due to such a defiance and the vote thereon is of no consequence. In other words, the Tenth Schedule as emended will in no way have helped Patel to alter the course of his defeat (in the event of the two votes by the zealous MLAs displaying their disloyalty towards their party before Shah were not declared invalid by the Election Commission) and yet the only consequence would have been the MLAs losing their status as MLAs.

It might appear ridiculous. It is. But the law itself would be ridiculous if only our elected representatives behave in an honourable manner and refuse to reduce themselves to commodities and turn rich themselves. That, it now seems, is asking for too much given the way our leaders behave and the media, particularly the visual media, has turned into a caged parrot of the establishment. It is asking for too much when parties, across the spectrum, have turned into enterprises on one person or a family and inner-party democracy is just not talked about even cursorily. Imagine what would have happened to Feroze Gandhi today if he had been around and been MP and raised a scandalous deal as the Mundhra scandal was that involved the Prime Minister’s trusted colleague as was TT Krishnamachari to Jawaharlal Nehru!

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