TMC split buzz: Why do Indian politicians so readily abandon their parties?

TMC split buzz: Why do Indian politicians so readily abandon their parties?

There's still intense speculation about the identity and exact number of MPs who will split from TMC and pledge their support to NDA. Moments such as these always lead to horse-trading and rumour-mongering. But what seems certain is the inevitability of a vertical split in the party.

Post-election defections, resignations or party splits are common in India. They follow electoral defeats and victories like the post-election undoing of majorities in Maharashtra in 2022, MP in 2020, Karnataka in 2018, and Arunachal Pradesh in 2016. The list grows if one adds majorities built through defections after hung verdicts, as in Manipur in 2017, or Puducherry in 2021, or the slow erosion of MLAs between elections, as in Goa between 2017 and 2022. In TMC's case, we have a party splitting vertically after an election, in similar fashion to Shiv Sena and NCP in Maharashtra a few years ago.


So, what makes so many politicians so prompt to abandon their parties? It would be easy to characterise this as individual greed and opportunism. But party splits never occur from individual decisions alone. They are engineered, often with the support - if not through the initiative - of other parties.

BJP has a vested interest in splitting one of the largest opposition parties and, in the process, increasing its majority in Parliament. Party splits and mass resignations are defections in hiding and are never spontaneous. But beyond individual opportunism and political engineering, there are systemic factors that help explain why party allegiance is so brittle in India.

Regional factors: Political transitions in Bengal are notoriously total. When TMC came to power in 2011, it captured much of the CPM's local machinery, and the communists were effectively destroyed as an organisational force. When BJP lost in the 2021 assembly election, it saw a mass desertion of the very people it had recruited, many former TMC workers who had switched sides only years earlier. For the defeated, the future journey through the desert seems particularly long.

Moving on: Defeats lead to loss of local resources and party patronage, due to organisational collapse. This creates powerful incentives to seek greener pastures.

Ideo-illogical: Ideology has always proved a friable cement for party organisations. One of the TMC faction leaders, Ritabrata Banerjee, originally came from CPM and now claims to support BJP.

Careering: Most parties fish from the same pond. Candidates who are individually wealthy political entrepreneurs, willing to stake small fortunes on short careers in office, making India's political class highly interchangeable.

Ball unchained: Parties are hyper-centralised and often led by authoritarian figures. This is usually more of a problem in defeat than in victory. In TMC's case, grievances voiced by disgruntled MPs about Mamata Banerjee's style of functioning are neither new nor unknown, and can't be treated as genuine causes for departure.

This is not a new phenomenon. In his 1969 book, The Politics of Defection: A Study of State Politics in India, constitutional expert Subhash Kashyap documented more than 1,400 cases of defection between 1967 and 1969, two crucial years of political realignment in national and state politics. Party splits were also common, often engineered by other parties.

Many of these defections involved groups rather than individuals, altering post-facto electoral outcomes. When Indira Gandhi came back to power in 1980, she fielded 22 turncoats from the collapsed Janata coalition, many of whom had deserted Congress earlier.

The anti-defection law, passed in 1985 precisely to prevent such spectacles, has long since been outwitted. Its central flaw is that it cannot prevent MPs or MLAs from simply resigning or splitting their party, which is technically a voluntary act, and, therefore, outside its reach.

Mass resignation is a legal disguise for defection. A party that controls majority of a legislature's seats can engineer a split, claim it constitutes two-thirds of the parliamentary group, and seek recognition as a legitimate faction - as TMC rebels are now attempting. The law that was meant to protect electoral mandates has, in practice, provided a technical roadmap for circumventing them.

Immediate implications are clear. If 20 TMC MPs switch to NDA, it would push the ruling coalition's strength above 300 in Lok Sabha, still short of the two-thirds threshold but a useful symbolic addition. More significantly, it accelerates NDA's gains in Rajya Sabha that would otherwise take years to materialise from the recent Bengal election results.

Parliamentary arithmetic aside, it's the principles that matter. Party splitting, either opportunistic or engineered (or both), makes a mockery of voters' choices. Electoral verdicts are processed and, at times, altered in ministerial residences rather than polling booths. It's not surprising that Cockroach Janta Party demands sanctions against politicians who defect.

In the end, the political future of those who break their parties is usually grim. Some may be rewarded with cabinet positions. But most end up in a political dungeon after enjoying the proverbial few minutes of fame.