Defection games are a blot on democracy

Shatrughan Sinha, the celebrated Hindi film actor, left his association of a quarter century with the BJP on Saturday. He will now contest the Patna Saheb seat — of which he is the sitting BJP MP — as a Congressman. This makes him one of the most high-profile defectors in Indian politics.

For the record, the actor left the BJP as he was denied the party ticket to contest the coming Lok Sabha election. This is probably because for the past five years he has been a running critic of the Narendra Modi government. In BJP circles it is speculated that unlike former PM Atal Behari Vajpayee, who had made Mr Sinha a Cabinet minister, Mr Modi wasn't solicitous of him at all, and this was the reason for his rebellion.

The actor’s departure, thus, wasn’t on a point of principle or ideological dissonance. It was the simple transactional matter of not being given a chance to again be an MP. Alas, this is how low the noble realm of politics has sunk in India.

Over the years, it’s the Congress that has been at the receiving end of such politics. In more recent times, the ship was being deserted as the party has grown weak and seen as less likely than before as being a vehicle of power.

And much of the time, the party that shamelessly poached from the Congress (and sometimes other parties) has been the BJP, which threw principle to the winds and unscrupulously sought to make members of other parties defect to it. Such shameful conduct caught on, though it wasn’t the BJP that started the trend of defections. But the saffron party did turn it into a fine craft form.

In the final analysis, a regular traffic of legislators between parties reduces the party system, on which democracy crucially rests, to a joke; indeed to a commercial proposition most of the time. Defectors are anyway unreliable, and no one can be sure how long Mr Sinha will remain with the Congress even if he wins his election. Switching parties has become like trying out another shop. It’s a pity a party like the Congress has stooped to play this game.

However, it is not for the likes of BJP stalwart and former Himachal Pradesh CM Shanta Kumar to criticise Mr Sinha for playing the “politics of dishonesty”, as he did on Saturday. Mr Kumar had not winced when in the 1990s his party had enticed the very corrupt but influential Congress leader — and former CM — Sukh Ram to defect to the BJP. Just days ago, Mr Sukh Ram has done a return defection to the Congress, and this has hurt Mr Kumar as much as Mr Sinha becoming turncoat. The conscience should not twinge selectively.