An independent MLA in Haryana switching sides gave Indian politics its most durable phrase in 1967. Two failed Bills, one constitutional amendment and one repeal later, the same argument is back before the Supreme Court. The pattern running through six decades is that each reform raised the threshold, and each threshold became a target.
Kochi: Tracing the history of defection law at a talk on ‘Horse Trade and Democracy’ organised by the All India Lawyers Union, Senior Advocate Kapil Sibal made an argument that is worth separating from the political controversy around it: every generation has found a way around the last reform, and the law has consistently followed the practice rather than anticipating it.
The record bears that out. Here is how the Tenth Schedule came to exist, and how it has been worked around at every stage.
1967: the year the floor started moving
The Fourth General Election of 1967 broke the Congress monopoly. The party retained power at the Centre but its Lok Sabha strength fell from 361 to 283, and it lost several States. Coalition governments appeared for the first time at scale, and with them the arithmetic that made individual legislators decisive.
The emblem of that year was Gaya Lal, an independent MLA elected from Hodal in the newly created State of Haryana. He crossed the floor repeatedly within a very short period, the most widely repeated version being three switches in a single day. When Rao Birender Singh presented him to the press after one such crossing, he is said to have announced that Gaya Ram was now Aaya Ram. The phrase has never left Indian political vocabulary.
Haryana was not an isolated case. Presidential rule followed in several States, and governments across the country rose and fell on shifting blocks of legislators.
The Chavan Committee’s numbers
Following a Lok Sabha resolution adopted in December 1967, the Government constituted a Committee on Defections chaired by the then Union Home Minister Y.B. Chavan. Its report, submitted in early 1969, supplied the numbers that still anchor the debate.
The Committee recorded roughly 542 instances of defection across the entire span between the First and Fourth General Elections, and found that at least 438 of them, close to eighty per cent, occurred in the twelve months between March 1967 and February 1968 alone. Of 376 independents elected, 157 joined political parties in that period. The Committee also recorded that a substantial number of defecting legislators were rewarded with ministerial office, a figure commonly cited as 116 out of 210 across seven States.
The Committee’s diagnosis was that this was a betrayal of the electorate’s trust driven by the lure of office. Later estimates put floor crossings between 1967 and 1985 at more than 2,700.
Two failed attempts: 1973 and 1978
Legislating on the Committee’s findings proved harder than diagnosing the problem.
The first attempt came in 1973 from Home Minister Uma Shankar Dikshit in the Indira Gandhi government. The constitutional amendment bill was referred to a Joint Committee of the two Houses in December 1973, where it remained for years before lapsing with the dissolution of the Fifth Lok Sabha in January 1977.
The second came in 1978, when Shanti Bhushan, Law Minister in the Janata Party government of Morarji Desai, brought the Constitution (Forty-eighth Amendment) Bill. It too went nowhere.
The reason both failed is instructive and has not changed. Parties that had suffered defections wanted a curb; parties that expected to gain from them did not. The result was another eighteen years of floor crossing.
1985: the Tenth Schedule arrives
The third attempt succeeded, and the reason was arithmetic. The Rajiv Gandhi government came to office in the aftermath of Indira Gandhi’s assassination with more than 400 Lok Sabha seats, which meant the Bill could pass without the cooperation of those who stood to lose by it.
The Constitution (Fifty-second Amendment) Bill was piloted by Law Minister Ashoke Kumar Sen. Its Statement of Objects and Reasons put the case in terms that have aged well:
“The evil of political defections has been a matter of national concern. If it is not combated, it is likely to undermine the very foundations of our democracy and the principles which sustain it.”
The Lok Sabha debated the Bill for over seven hours on January 30, 1985 and passed it unanimously. The Rajya Sabha followed the next day. The President assented on February 15, 1985, and the amendment was brought into force the following month. The Tenth Schedule entered the Constitution, and for the first time the political party became a constitutional category rather than a purely political one.
Its core, in Paragraph 2, is straightforward. A member who voluntarily gives up membership of his party, or who votes or abstains contrary to the party’s direction, stands disqualified, subject to the exceptions that follow.
The split exception, and its abuse
The exceptions are where the story turns. The Schedule as originally enacted contained two: a split under Paragraph 3, available where one-third of a legislature party broke away, and a merger under Paragraph 4, available at two-thirds.
The split exception reproduced the old problem at a higher threshold. Wholesale defection was simply rebranded. The most cited illustration is from Uttar Pradesh, where legislators crossed in successive batches while disqualification petitions lay undecided, until the cumulative number crossed the one-third mark and the crossing was then recognised as a split. That sequence, in which delay by the presiding officer is itself part of the method, has recurred in every subsequent phase of this story.
Meanwhile, in Kihoto Hollohan v. Zachillhu in 1992, a Constitution Bench upheld the Tenth Schedule by three to two, while striking down the provision that had sought to oust judicial review and holding the Speaker’s decision reviewable on limited grounds. The minority took the view that the Speaker, who holds office at the pleasure of the majority whose legitimacy is in question, was an unsuitable adjudicator. That minority reasoning has been quoted with increasing frequency since.
2003: one door closes
The Constitution (Ninety-first Amendment) Act, 2003, passed under the Vajpayee government, deleted Paragraph 3 and with it the split route, leaving the merger exception in Paragraph 4 as the only surviving escape from disqualification.
The same amendment did two other things aimed at the incentive rather than the act. It capped the council of ministers at fifteen per cent of the strength of the House, and it barred a member disqualified for defection from holding ministerial office until re-elected. Both were attempts to address what the Chavan Committee had identified in 1969 as the engine of the whole phenomenon.
Why it matters
Set out in sequence, the shape of the thing becomes hard to miss. Before 1985 the individual crossed the floor. After 1985 the group split at one-third. After 2003 the group merges at two-thirds. The venue changed from the farmhouse of the 1960s to the resort of the 2010s, and more recently to a presiding officer’s letter recognising a merger. What has not changed is the commodity in question, which is the seat the voter conferred.
There is a second pattern worth noting, which is that the reform diagnosis has never been the missing piece. The Dinesh Goswami Committee on Electoral Reforms recommended in 1990 that the adjudicating power be moved away from the Speaker to the President or Governor acting on the Election Commission’s advice. The Law Commission said much the same in its 170th Report in 1999 and again in its 255th Report in 2015. None of it was acted upon. The defects of the Tenth Schedule are not undiscovered; they are documented and unaddressed, which is a different problem and a harder one.
The question now before the Supreme Court, whether the two-thirds figure in Paragraph 4(2) establishes a merger of political parties or merely permits two-thirds of a legislature party to walk across and call it one, is the latest instalment of exactly this sequence. Whichever way it is answered, the history suggests the more useful question is what the next threshold will be, and who will get there first.
Speaker: Senior Advocate Kapil Sibal, Independent Member of the Rajya Sabha
Occasion: Talk on ‘Horse Trade and Democracy’, All India Lawyers Union, Kochi, September 13, 2026
Key milestones: Committee on Defections chaired by Y.B. Chavan, report 1969 | Constitution (Fifty-second Amendment) Act, 1985, inserting the Tenth Schedule | Kihoto Hollohan v. Zachillhu, 1992 | Constitution (Ninety-first Amendment) Act, 2003, deleting the split exception