A month after elections in West Bengal, the TMC is staring at total disintegration as MLAs and MPs pledge support to the BJP. Just last month, seven AAP MPs joined the BJP. This has raised questions on the failures of the anti-defection law, the BJP’s use of power and resources to impose one-party dominance despite losing its majority in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. Is this a symptom unique to Indian politics? Why is this moment in history different from the Congress years? With institutional capture laying bare the electoral process, in the 12th year of the Modi government, how can we describe this moment of the Indian democracy?

Gilles Verniers, political scientist and researcher at CERI, Sciences Po Paris recently told The Wire’s Sravasti Dasgupta why political parties splitting is worrisome for the Indian democracy.

Below is their full conversation, edited slightly for clarity. It has been transcribed by Ayushi Singh, an editorial intern at The Wire.

Sravasti Dasgupta: Hello and welcome, you’re watching The Wire. I’m Sravasti Dasgupta. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is celebrating 12 years of being in power. And if you take a look at the newspapers this morning or television media or even social media, you’ll see how the BJP is really celebrating Modi being the longest serving prime minister. Now, questions of course are being raised by the Congress on how this calculation has been reached. But that’s a separate matter. The fact is that as Modi celebrates 12 years in power, the latest is that smaller parties in India, the latest example being the Trinamool Congress are slowly disintegrating. 

This is a story that we have earlier seen in other states as well, whether it’s in Maharashtra or Madhya Pradesh or even in Punjab where the Aam Aadmi party’s several MPs have recently joined the BJP. So is the country now in a unique situation where the BJP is both in government as well as in opposition? To answer some of these questions, I’m being joined by Gilles Vernier, he is a political scientist and he’s come to our studio today. So, thank you very much for joining us. 

Before we get to answering the central question of whether the BJP is emerging as both the government and the opposition, let us first talk about what’s happening in the TMC. We know that after the elections – it’s been just about a month – and after the elections about 60 MLAs in the assembly have formed their own faction. Here in Delhi the MPs too claim to have support of about 20 out of the 28 MPs and they have pledged their allegiance to the NDA. 

Now we’ve seen this in the past, as I was mentioning earlier, but how would you characterise this? I was listening to a former TMC MP, Sushmita Dev, who just resigned a few hours before we were recording this interview. She has not formally joined the BJP or any other party but what she’s telling the media is that  there is no “political opportunism” in politics, which I found quite interesting, so I wanted to ask you that do you see this churn in the TMC simply as political opportunism or is it engineered…?

Gilles Vernier: Well, if that was the case then it would be a demonstration that there’s always something new to learn about Indian politics. Obviously there is a question of individual opportunism and opportunity. 

We know in the context of West Bengal that victories and defeats tend to be fairly total in the sense that a party that wins an election tends to capture the organisational machinery of its opponent and gets itself settled in power for quite a long time. And so now there’s an open desert in front of TMC parliamentarians and it’s not exactly surprising that many of them would wonder whether they would rather cross the desert for an indefinite period of time or whether they would want to make other decisions. 

But I don’t think that the situation we’re in, which is the question of a party split rather than individual decisions, can be summarised as simply the sum of individual decisions.

We know historically party splits have happened a lot more in the past than in the present.  It’s always the result of collective decisions. It’s always the result of some form of engineering by other parties and usually you look towards the party that tends to gain the most from these party splits. 

In this case there’s no mystery. The BJP does stand to gain from the division of one of the largest opposition parties and would gain parliamentary support in the process.  

SD: So because you mentioned that this is not a new phenomenon and a lot of the advocates of the BJP for instance would say that this is not something new that’s happening now even though the opposition is accusing the BJP of engineering all these defections and party splits…The old saying “Aya Ram gaya Ram,” happened in the Congress years but do you see any distinction with the present context and the Congress years? 

GV: Well, in the Congress years, you had huge amounts of defections that were engineered. The whole period of consolidation of the opposition happened first because  the Congress party itself got split at different points in its history and from the period of alternation that we saw in the 1970s – in the 1960s in state politics before Emergency and after Emergency in national politics – we’ve seen a lot of  back and forth. When Mrs. Gandhi came back to power in 1980 she gave a lot of tickets to candidates who themselves had been with Congress before so that kind of back and forth was really common. 

This is something that we see now. It tends to be greater when there’s a phase of dominance, when there’s really one strong dominant actor in the middle of the political game because that provides further incentives for people who find themselves at the margins to sort of enter the new mainstream, the new dominant party and so in a way the period now sort of replicates what used to take place in the 60s and in the 70s when the Congress was dominant. 

SD: So in that context one could say that a large part of this led to the anti-defection law in 1985. So, after close to 40 years, do you think the law has failed? 

GV: Anti-defection law clearly is defective in the sense that it’s not preventing the kind of political realignments that we are seeing and that we have seen in Indian politics for a long time. It was designed in the mid-80s to check a particular form of defection which was prevalent at the time, which was individual or groups........

© The Wire