A day after 20 rebel Trinamool Congress Lok Sabha MPs declared their merger with the little-known Nationalist Citizens Party of India and approached the Lok Sabha Speaker for separate seating, legal views differ on whether the step amounts to defection and invites disqualification under the Tenth Schedule.
Rebels argue they can avoid disqualification because more than two-thirds of the MPs have joined another party. They refer to a 2022 Bombay High Court Goa Bench ruling that upheld dismissal of petitions against 12 MLAs who moved to the BJP, presented as a merger of legislature parties meeting the two-thirds threshold.
Central to the discussion is Paragraph 4 of the Tenth Schedule, which exempts disqualification when the original party merges with another and at least two-thirds of the legislature party consent. The provision states that merger occurs only if two-thirds of the concerned legislature party agree.
The Goa court noted that Parliament set the two-thirds threshold to protect members from disqualification when such agreement exists, and courts must respect that legislative choice.
Legislative expert Chakshu Roy observed that presiding officers have previously accepted two-thirds mergers, and the Bombay High Court upheld them when challenged. Without a Supreme Court ruling, judicial clarity on the anti-defection merger rules remains absent.
Opposing views hold that the Tenth Schedule requires a twin test and that only the political party, not merely the legislature party, can merge. Rajya Sabha MP Kapil Sibal stated that because the legislature party alone merged, the MPs face disqualification. He added that representation on an unallotted symbol would be illegal under a party-based constitutional system.
Former Lok Sabha secretary-general P D T Achary agreed, stressing that the law protects MPs only when their political party merges and two-thirds of its legislators consent. The intent was to cover party mergers, not legislature-party actions alone.
