Political Parties

Story hook

On 21 June 2022, a charter flight took off from Mumbai's Chhatrapati Shivaji airport carrying 39 MLAs of the Shiv Sena. By the time they landed in Guwahati's Radisson Blu — after a brief stopover in BJP-ruled Gujarat — the Maharashtra government of Uddhav Thackeray had less than 72 hours to live. Their leader, Eknath Shinde, claimed to represent "the real Shiv Sena". The Uddhav faction insisted that the law of the land — the Tenth Schedule — required two-thirds of legislators to defect en bloc to a different party to escape disqualification.

What followed was an 18-month constitutional drama. The Election Commission ruled the Shinde faction was the "real" Shiv Sena in February 2023 and handed it the bow-and-arrow symbol. The Supreme Court — in Subhash Desai v. Principal Secretary (May 2023) — held that the Speaker's failure to decide disqualification petitions promptly had undermined the Tenth Schedule's purpose, but stopped short of restoring the Uddhav government. The Court left it to the Speaker to decide. The Speaker took until 10 January 2024 to rule — and held that the Shinde faction was the original Shiv Sena.

This single sequence shows almost every weakness of India's anti-defection law, the Election Commission's symbol jurisdiction, and the Representation of People Act 1951: vague tests for "party splits", speaker delays, and the strange phenomenon where a faction with 40 MLAs out of 56 can capture both the legal identity of a party and the government — without facing voters first.

Why this matters for UPSC

Political parties + anti-defection + RPA form the most litigated area of electoral law in modern India. The Tenth Schedule has been invoked in Karnataka 2019, Goa 2019, Madhya Pradesh 2020, Maharashtra 2022, and Jharkhand 2024. UPSC asks about it in every Prelims since 2018 (the Tenth Schedule's amendment by the 91st Constitutional Amendment) and at least twice in Mains (2018 GS-II, 2022 GS-II). Interview boards probe it as a sign of how serious you are about Indian polity.