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A few days ago I decided that I wanted a pet at home.
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Now dogs are a cliché, cats are selfish, snakes can kill you.
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So I thought why not buy a horse?
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I googled for horse trading and I found the number of a firm called horse trading enterprises.
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I called the number and told the guy on the phone that I wanted to buy a horse.
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He said no problem, I will bring some horses to your apartment and you can choose one.
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I gave him my address and he said he would be there by 4pm.
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At 4pm my doorbell rang.
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I ran over to the door.
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I really wanted a horse in my apartment.
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I had decided that I would buy a brown horse and I would name it Black Beauty just to confuse
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Anyway, I opened the door and there stood a guy wearing a t-shirt that said horse trading
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Sir, you want to buy horses?
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Yes, yes I said, show me horses, do you have any brown horses?
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We only have brown horses, he said to me and gestured behind him.
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Four men in kurta pajama stepped forward from the shadows.
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The guy said these are our horses.
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They are all independent MLAs and they are for sale.
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But I don't want to buy bloody MLAs, I said, I want to buy horses.
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The MLAs looked at each other and sniggered.
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The salesman glared at me and said, WTF dude, don't you know what horse trading is?
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Welcome to the Seen and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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Please welcome your host, Amit Barma.
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Welcome to the Seen and the Unseen.
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My subject today is the anti-defection law of 1985 and my guest is Barun Mitra, an activist
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and commentator based in Delhi.
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Barun, welcome to the show and tell me a little bit about the intent behind the anti-defection
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The anti-defection law had been debated for 10 years prior to that and you know in the
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late 60s, late 60s and throughout the 70s, there was this discussion about political
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parties and legislators, individual MPs, MLAs, changing sides, horse trading.
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The famous term coined, Ayyaram-Gayyaram, based on two persons in Haryana, that they could
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change parties morning and evening.
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This was an issue and this was seen to be a major problem in political instability,
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creating political instability within parties and then at times affecting government.
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So this law was thought of as a way to prevent this kind of petty defection, so-called to
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change parties if you are elected on a particular party ticket.
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If you were independent, it wouldn't apply, but if one is elected on a party ticket, then
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it was expected that he would stay with the party and not be allowed to move.
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So the anti-defection law became the first law that recognized political parties as an
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The Indian constitution has freedom of association under which parties and all other associations
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It didn't have any provision for a specific political party.
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So the 10th schedule first recognized political parties and then said that the party leadership
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can disqualify their MPs or MLAs if they defy the whip of the party issued on any specific
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bill on the floor of the house.
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So these two provisions were the critical component.
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Of course, there was the escape clause too, which said that if more than one third people
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in the party, in the legislator, wanted to change sides, they could.
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But individually, they couldn't.
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So now I think it has been raised to two thirds.
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That if two thirds wanted to change, take the whole party, they could, but not individually.
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But yeah, so these two provisions and you can see the effects.
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In the sense, individual defection from one party to another happens only prior to elections
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in the hope of a ticket.
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It no longer happens as it used to happen in the past.
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And what you can see is that while parties continue to split, I mean, we have thousand
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odd parties registered with the election commission, they no longer merge.
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So we have one man parties because every party, every politician who can form a floater party
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and survive thinks the risks of joining anyone else limits their political options.
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So essentially the intention of the law was twofold.
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One to avoid detection and therefore protect parties and organizations, protect apparatus
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And two to stop political corruption because you couldn't buy MPs anymore and money alone
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would not sway votes, which would seem to be a noble enough intention.
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What are the unintended consequences of the anti-defection law?
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One which had been debated right through the course of the anti-defection discussion from
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the seventies through the eighties as well is what impact it has on freedom of expression.
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After all, MPs, legislators are elected to debate and they're expected to vote.
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If their choices are limited, then it does curtail freedom of speech and expression of
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the elected representative.
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So this was a fundamental doubt or a question that hung over this issue for a long time
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But what was not really recognized or not really seen at that time was what kind of
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impact it could have firstly on parliament itself, that is legislator parliaments and
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And it's crippled the functioning of parliament in assemblies in many cases.
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And the second one, again, which was not really foreseen was a negative and perverse impact
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on the culture of political discourse itself, not just within parliament or assemblies,
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but in the general society as such.
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And these two, I think, are really taking a toll now.
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And one evidence of that is that there are even MPs who are beginning to voice their
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concern about this particular anti-defection law.
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I mean, we often lament how the quality of political discourse has gone down over the
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I mean, if you just see the parliamentary records of the fifties and sixties and the
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quality of discourse is incredibly high and people are tackling very nuanced issues.
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And what would seem with the anti-defection law is you're forced to take one side of an
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issue and therefore it kills nuance, it kills depth of discussion and so on and so forth.
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Would you say there are other cultural factors which cause that or the anti-defection law
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is a very big part of that?
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I mean, if you look at the data, you could say that in the 1950s, Indian parliament used
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to sit for between 120 to 130 days a year, that's four months.
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And typically in a five-year term of the Lok Sabha, they would pass 300 plus bills, registrations.
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Today parliament sits for barely 70 days and the last Lok Sabha, that is the fifteenth
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Lok Sabha of Dr. Manmohan Singh and the UPA government, they could pass only 179 bills
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with 68 that lapsed because Lok Sabha got dissolved, which clearly shows that the quantitative
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part in terms of sittings have drastically reduced from 120 and 25 to about 70 and the
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This was of course not only a consequence of the anti-defection law, there was a slight
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tendency or slight trend towards in the same direction through the late 70s and 80s prior
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to the anti-defection when we had absolute majorities in parliament and the belief was
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and this was the underlying philosophy that took shape that democracy is about majority
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If you have the numbers was the point in a debate and anti-defection law is a culmination
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of this philosophy and this to me has undermined, has contributed greatly, the philosophy as
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well as this law that came out of that philosophy contributed greatly to undermining the democratic
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culture in our legislative assemblies as well as in the popular and the discussion and discourse
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So I think the quality of debate, the duration of the reduction in the timings of the houses,
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these are reflections of the deterioration that has been taking place and what has not
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been recognized in this majoritarian democratic perspective that has been accepted widely
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is without discussion, without debate, without deliberation, what function would a legislative
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The whole purpose of a legislative assembly is to provide an opportunity for elected representatives
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of the people to consider various proposals to debate their merits and the pros and the
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cons, come to certain conclusions and enact.
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Whether you try to win over the other side, you try to persuade the other side and that
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effort depended not just on the fact that you have a majority because the government
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of the day is expected to have a majority in any case, but it was part of the culture
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that you discuss, you negotiate, you deliberate so that you have a much wider social political
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consensus on a particular issue so that it grows through without too much of rancor and
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That sense of political negotiation, bargaining, compromise, getting a sense of coming together
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on an issue and taking it forward, that has virtually collapsed.
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That's to me is a huge tragedy and it has undermined democracy itself because democracy
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is never about majority rule.
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That's a very insightful point to me because what the anti-defection law therefore seems
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to do is it seems to boil all democracy down to the event of the election itself and it
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completely makes parliament irrelevant because once you have the election result, you can
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feed it into a computer and everyone's supposed to vote along party lines anyway.
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So debate and discussion become completely pointless and irrelevant.
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One interesting thing I noticed, however, is that while it's diminished the quality
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of parliamentary discourse, it's not ended the discourse itself, it's just made it far
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more strident and almost violent.
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And you can actually see that that apart from the quantitative aspects in terms of sittings
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and the number of bills passed, which have of course come down, disruptions have increased
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because disruptions have become a major strategy or a way to display opposition because debates
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don't count, the numbers are known and therefore disruption is the only way opponents can think
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of capturing the headlines.
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Almost political posturing in a sense.
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And today it has gone down to the last few years that even the government side with a
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majority is willing to disrupt if they don't want to pursue a particular debate.
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So it's not that the government and the opposition are completely divided in terms of the strategies
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They both are adopting very similar strategies to avoid debate discussion if possible.
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And to me, there is the other consequence of this or fallout.
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If MPs are not able to debate, discuss, raise questions, how is an elected government or
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a executive part of the government, how will it be held accountable?
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Because it doesn't matter which party you belong, an MP or an MLA is entitled to ask
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any question it deems he or she deems fit to the government of the day.
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The first casualty in many of these situations have been the questioner, where the MPs and
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the MLAs are supposed to have freedom to ask any question they want and the ministers are
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But that's gone because now we have disruptions to a large extent.
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The second one, so the government's accountability is reduced.
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So government gets a blank check more often than not and which you can see that the number
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of bills that get passed without any debate through a voice vote mechanism that everybody
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knows the numbers because calls for a voice vote, IS have it, IS will always have it,
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And the second part is that since we don't have vote, that is legislators as MPs and
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MLAs are not voting on specific bills, how will I or you or any citizen of India be able
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to assess their MPs or MLAs?
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We don't know on what issue which MP or my MP or MLA is voting on.
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No, we may not know which way an MP might vote, for instance, on the issue of say the
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gay's rights or on any bill or on terrorism laws.
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In fact, that renders it almost irrelevant what your MP stands for because ultimately
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he has to vote with his party and that's the extent of his influence.
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That means the attendance has come down, that a lot of MPs and MLAs don't see any point
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in being in the assembly or the legislature to debate, to make their point because they
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all know that the outcome is a foregone thing.
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And which means that I and you and citizens of India are deprived because they don't
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have a very clear way of knowing which way their MPs and the elected representatives
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are behaving on specific issues, after all that's what is important.
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You know, for instance, in UK, almost 80 to 90% of the bills are voted upon and people
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know that which way and the same is true in the US, that people know which way a particular
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legislature has voted on which issue and therefore you can build up a whole political history
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of a legislator on a specific issue.
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We have no way of doing it anymore because we have simply stopped voting and that's
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because there's no point in debate and we know the numbers and therefore there's no
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point in holding parliament itself, that's the logical conclusion and in some state assemblies
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we have reduced annual number of days that the assembly sits to less than a month.
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So I'd like to go back to something you said earlier when you said that it's not just the
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parliamentary discourse which has diminished because of this but as a result of political
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discourse diminishing in the political space, it's also discourse which has been affected
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outside among the common people.
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Can you elaborate on that?
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Yeah, I mean that seems to be a very logical conclusion.
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After all, parliament is the temple of democracy and the way the people behave there obviously
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is transmitted to the rest of the society.
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And so I won't be surprised if somebody finds that increased disruption inside parliament
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is leading to polarization opinion not just within parties but even across parties outside
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parliament that ordinary people are polarized and they take probably a cue from the state
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of affairs in parliament and as a state assemblies that debate is pointless, you only need the
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numbers and whoever has the might is right.
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And the explosion of what should I say, uncivil discourse, use of unparliamentary language
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not so much inside parliament but outside parliament has surely multiplied many times.
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Social media has really allowed that to happen without the presence of a speaker who has
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the power to expunge unparliamentary words.
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So we are seeing this polarization in my view seems to be a polarization and breakdown of
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discourse is an extension of the disruptions and the conflict inside parliament.
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In fact, it would seem to me that the term unparliamentary language itself needs to be
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revised that if someone is saying something in a polite manner, that is perhaps unparliamentary
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in the current context.
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So this finally leads me to the irony that the anti-defection law will therefore be always
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with us because it protects a party establishment and if you can't vote against a party establishment
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because of the law, you can't get rid of the law itself.
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So it just perpetuates itself in a sense.
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Yeah, in a way it might perpetuate itself for a long time.
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But I think the extent and the intensity of polarization is leading to a sense of realization
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at least among some MPs for the first time I'm seeing MPs, at least a few MPs publicly
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voicing their concern about the various implications of this anti-defection law.
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So I can only hope that that sense will grow because 10 years ago there was no one talking
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about the political and social consequences of anti-defection law.
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So now that the even MPs are beginning to realize that there is a problem, I hope things
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will change, but more than the law itself, what needs to change is our understanding
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If we really think democracy is majority rule, then we don't need parliament.
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If we believe that elections and majority is one time in four years or five years and
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the rest of the time you spend on debate, discussion, deliberations to build a larger
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social coalition, the machinery of democracy, then of course things will change and I can
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just hope for the best.
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Varun, thank you so much for coming on the show and talking about the unseen effects
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of the anti-defection law.
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It was a pleasure having you here.
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Thank you Amit, it was nice having you.
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And that's the end of today's episode.
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If you got this far, it means you did not defect from my show to another podcast and
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I hope you'll join me next week for yet another episode of The Scene and the Unseen.
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Next week on The Scene and the Unseen, Amit Varma will be talking to Alex Tabarrok about
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For more, get a scene unseen dot in.
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If you enjoyed listening to The Scene and the Unseen, check out another great show by
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IVM Podcasts made in India hosted by my friend Mae Thomas where every week she profiles up
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and coming independent Indian bands.
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Good evening ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking.
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Sorry to say but there's been a slight delay due to the apocalypse having suddenly begun.
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As you can see, there's death, destruction and chaos taking place all around us.
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But don't you worry, food and drinks will be served shortly and I would recommend checking
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out IVM Podcasts to get some of your favorite Indian podcasts.
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We'll keep you going till this whole thing blows over.
