The anti-defection law may need to be modified if we are to keep our polity clean. Anyone who walks out of a party to join a new party should be debarred from contesting elections anywhere on the new party’s symbol for a period of time long enough to discourage such opportunistic tos and fros. I am sure that this may be a tricky legislation to steer through the Parliament, but we need some version of this. OK, maybe I am reacting to too many such ‘defections’ that have been in the news recently, whether in Maharashtra or UP or West Bengal, and perhaps democracy is best served without such laws that decide who can and cannot represent people in a free and fair election.
That said, this whole fiasco of politicians crossing the floor and then crossing back at their whim (and opportunity), as well as the very same parties that they had betrayed (and mutually bad-mouthed) welcoming them back again, has left a bad taste in the mouth.
Now, this might be as difficult for politicians to understand as it would be for people falling for married (to others) people, but here it is for what it’s worth: “If they can cheat on the ones they swore loyalty to, and betray their trust, lie to them, hurt them, speak ill of them, kiss & tell later, and mock & debase their love, they can most definitely do the same to you. And they will. It’s a matter of time. And opportunity.”
Of course, politics and relationships are not based on such rigid ‘rules’ though in contrast, one plays the ball as it lies, making it prudent to take the most ‘practical’ route to whatever shared objective one may have.
I know of many spouses who have waxed eloquent about what they’d do if they ever caught their spouse cheating, and then, when actually faced with reality, forgiven (and tried their damnest to forget) the shenanigans of their cheating spouse, with the fond hope that THEIR cheating spouse is, somehow miraculously and against every statistical data point, not to mention common sense, not like OTHER cheating spouses and surely they won’t do it again. This is complete nonsense. The same is true for the person who the married spouse is cheating with.
tl;dr: Once a cheater, always a cheater. If you are cheating with a cheater, the cheater will cheat on you some day. That’s a guarantee.
Ditto politics, where one may claim that while it is true that most AyaaRams and GayaaRams are fickle in their loyalty and operate in extremely short-sighted ways under very specific circumstances in a space that makes them extremely selfish and self-serving by the very fact of being in that space, thus prioritising their greed and/or fear over the party’s, the party leader’s, or the general public’s, leave alone the nation’s interest as a whole, these disloyal, narcissistic, opportunists are not anywhere like MY lovely AyaaRam (or GayaaRam, depending on which direction the specific Ram is heading). Such claims are not only transparently erroneous, but are quite quickly showed to be such throughout history.
But like the cheated-upon spouse, the political leader hopes against hope that as long as the particular AyaaRam and GayaaRam are already in, or are tending towards joining in their party, abandoning their previous ones, it should be all right.
It seldom is.
