NEW DELHI: The midnight defection of six MLCs of the Bharat Rashtra Samiti (BRS) to the
Congress
in
Telangana
has put the grand old party in the line of rivals’ fire. Both the
BRS
and the BJP have attacked Congress for its double standards on defections and questioned the grand old party’s claims of upholding the Constitution.
The BRS, which has already lost several of its leaders after party’s crushing defeat in the assembly elections, mocked
Rahul Gandhi
with a screenshot of Congress’s election manifesto in which the grand old party had promised to amend the Tenth Schedule of the Constitution to make defection an automatic disqualification of the membership of the assembly or Parliament.
“Is this how you are going to uphold Constitution?” BRS leader K T Ramarao asked Rahul.
The BJP also targeted the grand old party. BJP national spokesperson Shezad Poonawalla hit out at the double standards of the Congress and asked Rahul Gandhi if this was not “Jod Tod ki Rajniti.”
However, both the BRS and the BJP have in the past been accused of encouraging defections from other parties to benefit them.
K Chandrashekar Rao’s BRS which ruled Telangana for two terms, engineered several defections to consolidate the party’s position in the state. According to reports, between 2014 and 2018, BRS orchestrated the defection of 4 MPs, 25 MLAs, and 18 MLCs. In its second term, the BRS benefitted from the defection of 14 MLAs, including 12 from the Congress party. In fact, most of the leaders who are now leaving the BRS were earlier with the grand old party.
The BJP, on the other hand, has also benefited on several occasions from political defections in the last 10 years. The saffron party has been accused of destabilising several Congress governments by encouraging defections. In Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh, the Congress lost its governments after several of its MLAs quit the party and eventually joined the BJP. In Goa also, at least 13 Congress MLAs quit the grand old party to join the BJP. In Gujarat, the Congress won 77 seats in 2017 assembly elections. However, in the next five years the party lost as many as 37 MLAs and saw its numbers deplete to 59 in state assembly ahead of the 2022 elections.
Defections have been a part of our politics for long and almost every political party has been accused of resorting to defections at some stage to bolster its numbers. In fact, the infamous slogan of “Aaya Ram, Gaya Ram” was coined at one stage to describe the instability in politics caused due to defections. In 1985, the government introduced the Constitution (Fifty-second Amendment) Bill in Lok Sabha to lay down provisions regarding disqualification of members on the grounds of defection and also inserted the Tenth Schedule in the Constitution. However, political parties have found a way to get around these provisions.
The Congress has been a victim of defections ever since its political decimation in 2014 Lok Sabha elections. In the last 10 years, the grand old party has lost several of its leaders – most of them to the BJP. However, despite suffering politically from defections, the Congress has opened its doors in Telangana for all disgruntled BRS leaders.
Clearly, when it comes to political defections, no party can claim a high moral ground.
