It may be no exaggeration to say that the Speaker of the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly has made a mockery of the Constitution with his decision on the Shiv Sena split. Speaker Rahul Narwekar’s decision to recognise Chief Minister Eknath Shinde, who left the Uddhav Thackeray-led group, as the leader of the actual Shiv Sena might be used as a textbook example of disregard for the legislative procedure and regulations.
While his decision legitimises the split, it is bad in the law’s letter and spirit. After years with the Shiv Sena and the NCP, Narwekar is now a member of the BJP, and it can be said that no one imagined anything different from him. Usually, there is a palpable anxiety in the air ahead of a crucial decision, such as on the disqualification of legislators. In Maharashtra, however, it was business as usual. Chief Minister Shinde was away from Mumbai, none of the political heavyweights were present in the state assembly as the order was being passed and the bureaucracy was busy preparing for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s high-profile Maharashtra visit on Friday. This, incidentally, is the 10th visit in as many months. This fact alone underlines how important Maharashtra is for the ruling dispensation in the coming polls. It also highlights how improbable it was, perhaps, to expect the Speaker to rock the boat by disqualifying the ruling Shinde-led group.
However, in absolving Messrs Shinde & Co of committing any legislative sins, the Speaker has left craters, not holes, in his order. One doesn’t have to be a legal eagle to highlight the three most glaring lacunae.
First, Shinde enjoyed a majority when he left Shiv Sena, says the Speaker. However, defection is a one-time act and not an ongoing process. The fact is that Shinde had 16 MLAs with him, out of 55, when he left for Surat en route to Guwahati. He went on to mop up another 21, thanks to the powers-that-be in Delhi, along with the Election Commission which looked the other way and the judiciary which, perhaps inadvertently, was late in its response. That Shinde had not had enough members with him initially was the reason that the Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena filed a disqualification petition against only these 16 MLAs, including Shinde.
While rejecting the demand to disqualify Shinde and his associates, the Speaker held as valid the appointment of a new whip by the splinter group. But this is in clear violation of the Supreme Court which, on May 11, 2023 had found fault with the Speaker’s decision to recognise the Shinde-appointed whip. The apex court had categorically dubbed as illegal the Speaker’s decision to appoint an MLA of the Shinde faction as the chief whip of the Shiv Sena. The SC, in that order, also articulated its views on differentiating party structure from its legislative wing and their powers.“To hold that it is the legislature party which appoints the whip would be to sever the figurative umbilical cord which connects a member of the House to the political party. It would mean that legislators could rely on the political party for the purpose of setting them up for election… but that they can later disconnect themselves entirely from that very party…,” the SC had said. It held that the whip being appointed by a political party is crucial for the Tenth Schedule and that the Speaker must recognise only the whip appointed by the political party. It would seem that Speaker Narwekar is either unmindful of the Court’s view or wants to ignore it for reasons not difficult to guess.
This leads to yet another and bigger contradiction. To turn the tables on the Uddhav Thackeray camp, the Shinde faction accused it of violating the party whip, becoming liable to be disqualified. Accordingly, a counter-petition was filed with the Speaker by the Shinde camp demanding the disqualification of 14 MLAs belonging to the Thackeray camp. This group of 14 MLAs refused to join hands with Shinde and instead stayed with Thackeray. Neither did they obey the diktat of the Shinde camp’s whip. And since the Speaker considers this newly appointed whip legal, as per the law, its violation on the floor of the House should have led to the disqualification of the 14 MLAs belonging to the Thackeray camp. However, in this case, Speaker Narwekar admits that the Thackeray camp MLAs violated the whip, but at the same time rejects the demand to disqualify them.
To say that the Speaker’s decision is bound to trigger yet another legal battle would be a no-brainer. It’s also not as if the Speaker, and those supporting him, aren’t aware of what lies ahead. Perhaps they have more faith in legal delays and what follows them. It was the delay that offered elbow room for political manoeuvring and thus set a new precedent in political battles. Until then, there were defections by individuals or by groups. But what Shiv Sena experienced was the taking away of a party from its leader, lock, stock and barrel. And it is not going to be for the last time.
Soon after, came the Shiv Sena-style split in the Sharad Pawar-led NCP. If in the Shiv Sena, Shinde, who had until then been party chief Uddhav Thackeray’s right-hand man, was lured away, in the NCP, it was Ajit Pawar, the nephew of party chief Sharad Pawar, who walked out of the party with the majority of MLAs. The thread that binds these two parties and their two splits is the BJP. This supremely confident power machine has not only perfected the art of engineering defections, it also has taken it to heights unimagined and unseen until now. Emboldened by the enormous success in Maharashtra, will the BJP take this model to other states as well? Might the Nitish Kumar-led JDU or, say, the Trinamool Congress, witness a blitz like the one in the Shiv Sena and the NCP?
The answer lies in how nimble-footed the judiciary is and how far it wants to go to assert “constitutional morality”. The Maharashtra Legislative Assembly Speaker’s decision could be the perfect opportunity for the courts to walk the talk.
The writer is editor, Loksatta
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