with the possibility of a third phase commencing in 2003 if the legislation currently under
debate in the Lok Sabha does become constitutional law.
The first phase would then be from 1950 to 1985, when no legislation existed with respect to
the issue of floor crossing (both in the shape of a change of affiliation of a member of
parliament to a certain legislative party and in the form of voting against the party line).
During this phase, members of the Lok Sabha and the state assemblies were free to change
their party affiliation without any restrictions and without any threat to their membership of
the respective legislative bodies. It was during the first much publicised wave of defections,
that from 1967 to 1971, almost 2,000 cases of defection occurred from among the 4,000
combined members of the Lok Sabha and the Legislative Assemblies in the States and Union
Territories. Out of the 210 cases of defection which occurred during the year 1967-1968 in
various Indian states, in 116 cases the defector was later included in the Council of
. The first initiative to ban defections was taken with the Constitution (Thirty-
second Amendment) Bill, 1973, which lapsed, however, after extensive debate in a Joint
The second phase in Indian politics would consequently be that from 1985 to 2003, after the
introduction of anti-defection legislation in the form of the Tenth Schedule to the Indian
Constitution by the Constitution (Fifty-second Amendment) Act, 1985 (GoI 1985). Paragraph
2, clause 1 of the Tenth Schedule, in connection with Article 102 (2) of the Indian
Constitution (GoI 1950a), stipulates that a member (whether elected as a candidate set up by a
political party, as an independent or nominated member) of either House of Parliament or any
Legislative Assembly in the said States or Union Territories shall be disqualified if he/she
gives up voluntarily his membership of the political party he belonged to at the time of
election, or if he/she votes or abstains from voting contrary to the directions of his/her party or
a person authorized by that party to give such directions without obtaining prior or subsequent
permission from that party. The same sanction is foreseen in Paragraph 2, clauses 2 and 3 of
the Tenth Schedule for defectors who were elected as independent candidates and who later
join a political party, or nominated members who join a political party after six months from
the date of his nomination. Exceptions from this rule are provided by Paragraph 3, which
stipulates that defecting members shall not be disqualified if they claim to constitute a group
of defectors as a result of a split which occurred in the original party and where this group
consists of no less than one third of the original legislative party to which they belonged.
Another exception is contained in Paragraph 4 (1) of the Tenth Schedule (GoI 1950a), which
13
See Kashyap (1989: 10) for details and the data on this era of defections.
8
Convention