The Anti-Defection Law — Why It Doesn't Actually Stop Defection
The Tenth Schedule was inserted into the Constitution by the 52nd Amendment in 1985. The intent was to end the 'Aaya Ram Gaya Ram' politics of the 1960s and 70s, where MPs and MLAs switched parties between sessions in exchange for cabinet posts or cash. Four decades later, governments at the state level still fall to engineered defections almost every year. The law has not solved the problem it was designed to solve.
What the law actually says
The Tenth Schedule disqualifies an elected legislator from their seat if they: (a) voluntarily resign from their party, (b) vote against their party's whip, or (c) join another party after election. The disqualification is decided by the Speaker of the relevant house.
The two loopholes that broke it
First, there is a 'split' exception (originally for one-third of the legislative party, narrowed by the 91st Amendment in 2003 to two-thirds for a merger). In practice, factions structure defections to clear the merger threshold. Second, the Speaker is a partisan office — the ruling party usually controls who holds it — which means disqualification proceedings are routinely delayed, sometimes for years, until the political moment has passed. The Supreme Court has flagged this delay problem in multiple judgments (notably Kihoto Hollohan, 1992, and the Manipur Speaker reference, 2020), but the structural fix is legislative, not judicial.
Where this hits hardest
State governments. The pattern has repeated in Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Goa, and most recently in several northeastern states: a ruling coalition is destabilised when twenty or thirty MLAs are flown to a resort, sworn in as part of a 'split' or simply waited out, and a new government is installed without going back to voters.
What a real fix looks like
A real fix requires three things: shortening the Speaker's window for deciding disqualification (Election Commission has suggested 90 days), making the decision appealable directly to the Election Commission rather than the High Court, and — most controversially — extending the disqualification from 'this term' to a multi-year ban on any elected office. CJP's manifesto goes further: a 20-year ban. Whether 20 years is the right number is debatable; the principle that there must be a real cost is not.
Why no party will do this
Every party in India has used defections to take or hold state governments at some point. Eliminating defections would freeze the current distribution of state-level power, which favours whoever has the largest current footprint. The political maths is symmetric — nobody wants to be the first to give up the tool.
Further reading
Anti-defection law on Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-defection_law. PRS Legislative Research has good policy briefs on every major amendment. The 2002 Constitutional Review Commission report (Justice Venkatachaliah) is the most thorough institutional review.
“Main bhi cockroach. Tum bhi banno.”