Parties used to break up before. MPs, MLAs, councilors or office-bearers of parties used to do defection earlier also. But never in the 75-year history of independent India had this work been done in an institutionalized manner. It happened in a simple, natural way. Once upon a time, leaders used to leave the party due to ideological and ideological conflict. Later the leaders started leaving the party to protect their personal interests. Then came a time, when the parties started breaking up or they started being disbanded in order to form or save the government. Almost all parties were involved in this. But now this politics has gone beyond that. Now the break-up of parties and MLAs-MPs has become institutionalized and it has become a monopoly of one party. Now only Bharatiya Janata Party can break any other party or get the leaders of other party to defect. If some other party does such a thing, then it is like an exception.
If we keep aside the defection that took place at the time of elections, then till now the main purpose of defection in politics was to form the government or topple the government. The BJP did the same in the initial days of its power or in the first phase of its campaign to free the country from the opposition. From Arunachal Pradesh to Manipur and from Karnataka to Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra etc. States were defection to form the government. The BJP formed its government by breaking the Congress. In Goa also what he did in the last election i.e. in 2017 election was only to form his government. He did not get majority in the election and he formed his government by gathering MLAs from here and there and then breaking the Congress. But this time the Congress party is broken in Goa, so its purpose was not to form the government. Because BJP was already in government and it had the support of 25 MLAs including its 20 MLAs.
This time in Goa, the Congress party was broken for another purpose. The BJP carried out this work to show its strength and create panic among the opposition parties. He did not need Congress MLAs, yet broke the Congress, so it was also his political motive to spoil the atmosphere created by the Congress’s India Jodo Yatra and this message in the states where the assembly elections are going to be held in the next two months. It should be conveyed whether the Congress is ending or is over. It is not accidental that as soon as the Congress MLAs in Goa broke up and joined the BJP, the leaders of the BJP named it Quit Congress campaign, then the leaders of the Aam Aadmi Party announced in a press conference that the Congress was over. Needless to say, who is to benefit from this announcement of the Aam Aadmi Party.
How the BJP has made defections or party break-up a political tool is also the case in Manipur, where it inducted five out of six MLAs of its former ally Janata Dal-U into its party. The BJP has its own absolute majority government in Manipur. He didn’t need JDU MLAs. But he had to make a political message. He had to show all the parties of the country that look, if Nitish leaves the BJP in Bihar, we will destroy his party across the country. To get the message made here, JDU was abolished in Dadar and Nagar Haveli and Daman Diyu. In both the union territories, the entire committee of JDU joined the BJP. Some Panchayat members of JDU who had also won, they also switched to BJP. The BJP didn’t need to do this but it did so that there would be panic among the opposition parties. They should realize the power of BJP.
In fact, it has become a game for the BJP now. Its leaders are enjoying it. They are destroying the opposition parties without any motive. One can see the example of Gujarat, where the BJP won 99 seats in the last election. The majority figure is of 92 seats. So, the government had a comfortable majority but it forced the resignation of more than a dozen Congress MLAs one by one. Today BJP has 114 and Congress 63 MLAs. Similarly, since the elections in Assam, the BJP’s state leadership is breaking Congress MLAs. In the Rajya Sabha elections, they got cross voting done so differently. Before the elections, there is talk of Congress MLAs breaking up in Himachal, while there are reports of Congress MLAs being in touch with BJP in both the states of Uttarakhand and Jharkhand. In this way the BJP is either breaking the party or getting the MLAs to defect or at least making the discussion that it can do so.
Apart from the BJP, some other parties have also defected, such as in Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrashekhar Rao’s TRS defection of some Congress MLAs or Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress in West Bengal broke some of the BJP MLAs. Or the Rashtriya Janata Dal in Bihar merged some MLAs of Asaduddin Owaisi’s party MIM into its party or the Congress in Rajasthan merged the MLAs of Mayawati’s party BSP into its party. But all these incidents are of exception. There is no trend coming out of them. Apart from the BJP, other parties do not do this work institutionally. It is not that Congress is trying to break BJP in Chhattisgarh or JMM and Congress together are trying to break opposition MLAs in Jharkhand. Opposition parties are not doing this kind of work. The BJP has a monopoly on this kind of work. He has made it a weapon for political messaging and to show his status to the opposition parties. It has been established by making its narrative in the media and social media also that BJP or Amit Shah can sabotage the party in whichever party they want.
