Current Affairs Brain Booster for UPSC & State PCS Examination (Topic: Merger of Political Parties under Tenth Schedule)

Current Affairs Brain Booster for UPSC & State PCS Examination

Merger of Political Parties under Tenth Schedule

The Rajasthan High Court has dismissed a petition filed by BJP MLA Madan Dilawar, challenging assembly Speaker C.P. Joshi’s inaction on the disqualification proceedings against the six BSP MLAs who had merged with the Congress.

Six BSP MLAs had last year declared that they had merged with the Congress, and Speaker understood to have accepted the merger in September last year. BSP refused to accept their merger with the Congress and termed it illegal and unconstitutional. BSP has only 6 seats in Rajasthan Assembly.
Since BSP is a recognised national party as such there cannot be any merger under para (4) of the Tenth Schedule at the state level at the instance of the 6 MLAs unless there is a merger of the entire BSP everywhere at the national level
MLAs “cannot claim any merger under any illegal and unconstitutional order” of the speaker, which is against the Tenth Schedule as well as against several judgments of the Supreme Court, including a three-judge bench decision in Jagjit Singh v State of Haryana (2006) and the constitution bench decision in the Rajendra Singh Rana (2007) case.

Paragraph 2(1)(a) of the Tenth Schedule, under which a member of a House belonging to any political party shall be disqualified if he has voluntarily given up his membership of such political party.
Paragraph 3 of the unamended Act made it clear that a split in the legislature party must have arisen as a result of a split in the original political party that is the organisational wing of the party. (deleted)
Paragraph 4, which deals with merger, which still remains in the Act, adopts similar phraseology: "A member of a House shall not be disqualified under sub-paragraph (1) of paragraph 2 where his original political party merges with another political party."
Under Paragraph 4(2), the merger of the original political party of a member of a House shall be deemed to have taken place if, and only if, not less than two-thirds of the members of the legislature party concerned have agreed to such merger.
The “merger” referred to in Paragraph 4(2) is seen as legal fiction, where members are deemed to have merged for the purposes of being exempt from disqualification, rather than a merger in the true sense.

Tenth Schedule identifies this dichotomy between state units and national units. As per Paragraph 4(2), “merger” of a party means merger of a legislative party of that House. In this case, it would be the Rajasthan Legislative unit of the BSP and not the BSP at the national level.
Paragraph 1 of the Tenth Schedule which defines terms specified in the context of the antidefection law states this clearly.
“Legislature Party” for the purposes of Paragraph 4 (which deals with mergers) “means the group consisting of all the members of that House for the time being belonging to that political party in accordance with the said provisions.”

In both Rajendra Singh Rana v. Swami Prasad Maurya (2007) and in Jagjit Singh v. State of Haryana (2006), the Supreme Court held that the split in the original party is a precondition for recognising a split in the legislature party. Experts suggest that the ratio of these decisions apply to a case of merger also.
The key aspect is that the cases cited above deal with splits where when one-third of the members of a legislative party splits; they could not attract disqualification as per Paragraph 3 of the Tenth Schedule.
In 2003, through the 91st Constitutional Amendment, Paragraph 3 was deleted from the Tenth Schedule.
The amendment was made as the onethird split rule was grossly misused by parties to engineer divisions and indulge in horse-trading.
One-third was regarded as an easy target to achieve and the law now exempts defection only when it is at two-thirds (in a merger).