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Saisuresh Sivaswamy

See how they run!

That Rajiv Gandhi's anti-defection law, enacted in 1985 when the country gave him the sort of parliamentary majority denied to even his illustrious grandfather, was iniquitous, unfair and not really all there, has been evident for the last 12 years.

The major fallout of this hasty piece of legislation was not that it banned defections, but that it legitimised wholesale defection. Sure, it outlawed retail floor-crossing, but it also emboldened our legislators to herd together and up their price. There have been defections across the country's political landscape since 1985, but it has required an OBC chief minister to do something his bosses could not a year earlier at the Centre for our political conscience-keepers to wake up to the pitfalls of this particular law.

And lest we forget, let me point out that among the major backers of Rajiv Gandhi's Lakshman rekha was one Vishwanath Pratap Singh -- yes, the very same gent who is now marshalling forces against that law even as one political scheme after another of his to keep the BJP out of South Block perish like hope and libido in middle age.

To me, all political parties are the same, each receiving the same amount of mistrust and suspicion. I believe they are all crooks out to make a living at the citizen's expense. Oh, something may get done as a corollary as they go about their main business of self-aggrandisement, but that's about all. I vote for what I perceive to be the least unwelcome from among a disreputable lot, and also so that no one else may cast my vote for someone I may dislike more.

Having said that, I really fail to understand what is so unnerving about the prospect of the BJP coming to power that everybody seems to be caught up in the exercise of how to go about preventing it, when there are at least three score points of agenda crying out for immediate attention from the authorities.

What Kalyan Singh has done is simply repeat what has been done before, and I am sure fairness demands that if those incidents of engineered defections were looked upon benevolently, so should the sordid drama at Lucknow. After all, there is no point trying to take a different perspective on the Uttar Pradesh happenings only because the BJP was in the thick of it.

There is immense sense in V P Singh's argument that if a legislator, who is elected on a particular party ticket, were to change his party, then he should resign his parliamentary seat and contest once again under the new label. But there are pitfalls here as well.

For one, this precludes Independents; should they be allowed to support any party at all considering their plank was non-party? And most important, what happens if representatives of one party support or take the support of a party against which they fought the elections in the first place -- does that also not amount to cheating the public?

That, anyway, was a loaded question. I wish V P and his camp followers, who suddenly appear to be legion, would apply their mind to it. In plain words, isn't it what constituents of the United Front are doing? They all won on an anti-Congress plank but yet have no qualms about taking its support in their bid to remain in power. Who is to decide the larger public good here, the voters or a handful sitting in New Delhi's drawing rooms?

All this hoo-ha over defections has suddenly assumed importance not because Messrs I K Gujral and Co are concerned about improving moral standards in politics. If they were, half their parliamentary colleagues would not be there. Instead, what is exercising their mind is the fear, real or exaggerated I don't know, that the BJP may repeat its UP performance at the Centre as well. After all, everyone knows that, one, the present government at the Centre is really achieving nothing on the anti-BJP front and, two, the longer it lasts the BJP may actually get strengthened -- it is obvious now that the UF constituents and the Congress cannot fight the general election side by side. Perforce they have to go for each other, which will expose the hypocrisy of the present arrangement to the voter as no amount of Arun Shourie can.

What is happening on the Congress front is really interesting. Here is a party led by a president who gives the impression of being serious about restoring his outfit to its earlier glory, yet nothing he does seems to go right. It was eyeball to eyeball with the UF over Deve Gowda in March-April this year, and he barely managed to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat there. His own party had been stunned by the brinkmanship shown by the Old Man In A Hurry.

And now comes the blunder over pressuring the UF into ordering President's rule in UP, after the Kalyan Singh government had proved its majority. What if the same is repeated in Delhi? So lock the stable doors, never mind if the hinges are worn out.

God knows the anti-defection law needs improvement, it was drawn up by a paranoid victor, hence the insistence on mass movement of legislators. But such a law, to be really effective, has to consider the voter's point of view. Any post-poll arrangement that seeks to falsify the voter's preference -- like the UF, I daresay -- should also be brought within its ambit. The prime objective of the law should not be to safeguard parties's interests, as is the present case, but the voter's choice. If that is not done, then our politicians will keep imitating the three blind mice, till kingdom come and beyond.

Saisuresh Sivaswamy