The anti-defection law was meant to end the era of the “Aaya Ram, Gaya Ram” politician. Four decades later, it has produced constitutional alchemists seeking ever newer ways to turn defection into legality. The latest spectacle involving rebel Trinamool Congress MPs seeking refuge in an obscure political outfit is less about Bengal’s shifting loyalties than whether the spirit of the Tenth Schedule can survive those determined to circumvent it. The sequence is revealing.

The initial suggestion that two-thirds of a legislature party could simply function as a separate bloc quickly encountered a constitutional obstacle. The “split” defence no longer exists. Parliament abolished it through the 91st Constitutional Amendment after discovering that what had been intended to protect genuine ideological ruptures had become a licence for organised defections and horse-trading. Faced with that reality, the strategy evolved. A prohibited split was repackaged as a permissible merger. Paragraph 4 of the Tenth Schedule protects legislators from disqualification where an original political party merges with another political party and at least two-thirds of the members of its legislature party agree to that merger.

The numerical threshold attracts........

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