The Politics of Defection: The Changing Contours of the Political Power Structure in State Politics in India

he Fourth General Elections held in February 1967 constitute a watershed in the post-independence political history of India. The monolithic Congress regime and its haloed leadership had concealed both the many operational weaknesses and the basic inner strength and resilience of the Indian system. While strongly reaffirming the people's deep involvement in the democratic process, the electoral verdict shattered the Congress Party's virtual monopoly of political power. It also exposed the artificiality of the political stability, democratic maturity and parliamentary sophistication at which the system had appeared to be operating. Results of the fresh elections held in five of the seventeen States in February 1969 only carried the process a stage further. The most important developments in the post-1967 political and parliamentary scene in India were the formation of coalition governments of widely heterogeneous elements in several States and the numerous defections on the floor of the State legislatures which affected the fate of ministries and the course of politics. This phenomenon, the politics of defection as it is commonly called now, has several psychological and socionomic dimensions and is closely related to the dynamics of human relations and leadership processes. In the present paper, an endeavor has been made to study it objectively, as a psycho-sociological reality, in terms of simple political legitimacy and constitutional legality and in the context of some of the more identifiable legal, political and psychological variables in order to understand its motivations, implications and consequences and more particularly its impact on the problems, processes and prospects of parliamentary democracy in India. Of the sixteen States of the Union that went to the polls in 1967 (there were no elections in Nagaland) the Congress Party did not gain an absolute majority in eight and failed to form the government in seven. Even in those States in which the Congress retained control, its strength was much depleted and in several cases defection by a few members changed the Party's legislative majority into a minority. In seven of the eight States where Congress failed to win an absolute majority, however, no single party took its