From Party Discipline To Electoral Mandate: Re-Engineering India’s Anti-Defection Law After Subhash Desai And Padi Kaushik Reddy
- IJLLR Journal
- Aug 15
- 1 min read
Shivani, Advocate, Bar Council of Delhi, New Delhi, India.
ABSTRACT
India's anti-defection law was enacted to protect electoral mandates and governmental stability, yet its institutional design increasingly produces the opposite risk: an individual legislator may lose office for dissent, while an organised faction may change the political control of a House by assembling the numerical shield of Paragraph 4. This paper offers a doctrinal and institutional study of the Tenth Schedule, updated through 4 August 2026. It traces the law from the Fifty-second and Ninety-first Constitutional Amendments through the Supreme Court's leading decisions, with particular attention to Subhash Desai v. Principal Secretary, Governor of Maharashtra and the 2025 decision in Padi Kaushik Reddy v. State of Telangana. It also examines the pending 2026 challenge in Kapil Sibal v. Union of India concerning the merger defence. The paper identifies two structural asymmetries: an asymmetry of scale, under which collective defection may receive greater protection than individual dissent, and an asymmetry of time, under which a delayed disqualification ruling may be legally retrospective but politically ineffective. It proposes a Mandate-Integrity Model: limited whips, independent adjudication, enforceable timelines, a genuine organisational-merger requirement, public procedural records and calibrated interim protection. The central claim is that stability cannot be secured by converting representatives into delegates of party leadership; it requires a law that distinguishes legitimate legislative conscience from mandate-altering political migration.
Keywords: Anti-defection; Tenth Schedule; Speaker; judicial review; merger; political party; legislative party; constitutional morality; free vote; India.
