Having majority no reason for lawmakers to defy party: Supreme Court

The Supreme Court made it clear on Wednesday (August 5, 2026) that a group of MLAs or MPs cannot override the official directives of the parent political party merely for the reason that they hold a majority among the elected members.

Justice Joymalya Bagchi, part of a three-judge Bench headed by Chief Justice of India Surya Kant, said the maturity of a democracy was measured by the constancy of political parties and their members to their ideology.

The court was hearing a prolonged dispute between the Shiv Sena factions led by Uddhav Thackeray and current Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde over who was the real party and the rightful bearer of the party symbol.

The party had split into two rival camps after Mr. Shinde, backed by 40 out of 55 party MLAs, rebelled and left the party led by Mr. Thackeray. The political crisis saw the eventual toppling of the Thackeray government. Mr. Shinde teamed up with the Devendra Fadnavis-led BJP side and formed the government. The Election Commission later on concluded that Mr. Shinde was the “real” Shiv Sena and gave his party the party symbol.

Senior advocate Kapil Sibal, appearing for Mr. Thackeray, said such “mergers” orchestrated by a faction of MLAs/MPs was not dictated by democratic or ideological powers, but a naked pursuit of power.

“You are carrying this shenanigan to an absurd level where the entire electoral process becomes a farce because the electoral verdict can be changed through manipulation and defection. The government that comes into existence is not the government that the people voted for. This has huge repercussions,” Mr. Sibal said.

The senior advocate said it was time the Supreme Court examined the “trend” of “coordinated and unilateral” shift of loyalties by legislators of one political party to another, leading to the overthrow of elected governments in multiple States.

He asked whether a few legislators could unilaterally decide a “merger” with another party without the knowledge of the parent political party.

“The control of the political party subsists over the legislature party. Any valid decision of the political party has to prevail over the will of the majority of the legislature party,” Justice Bagchi observed orally.

“Suppose a set of legislators of a political party, merely because they are in the majority, pass a resolution seeking to remove the office-bearers of the political party and, in furtherance of that, undertake a series of coordinated acts. They cannot remove the office-bearers of the political party. Those very acts amount to voluntarily giving up the membership of the political party. As this court has held, voluntary giving up of membership is determined from the conduct of the individual; nothing more is required,” Mr. Sibal submitted.

He, quoting an earlier judgment of the Supreme Court in the Shiv Sena case, said rebel legislators cannot be allowed to “conflate” the political party with the legislative party.

“If this is allowed, you can topple any government at any point in time. Legislators can switch over, form a new government and not bother about the political party,” Mr. Sibal argued.

The court indicated the striking of a balance between the electorate’s decision to vote a party to power and the individual representatives’ liberty to express genuine disagreement with the party’s decisions.

Mr. Sibal said the Election Commission’s decision was erroneously based on which faction had the majority in the legislature party.

He argued that the concept of a ‘split’ in the legislature party under the Tenth Schedule was unknown. There was no concept of a majority within a legislature party. A split, as a defence against the charge of defection under the Tenth Schedule, while it was in existence, only related to the political party.

‘Distinguishable concepts’

A 2023 Constitution Bench judgment in Subhash Desai versus Principal Secretary, Governor of Maharashtra, confirmed that the ‘original political party’ and the ‘legislature party’ were “distinguishable concepts” under the Tenth Schedule. The distinction between the two was neither artificial nor intertwined. Paragraph 1(b) of the Tenth Schedule defined ‘legislature party’ as a group of Members who belong to a particular party and Paragraph 1(c) construed an ‘original political party’ as the party to which the Members belonged to.

The judgment said the Tenth Schedule recognised the independent existence of a legislature party only to the limited extent of presenting a defence for Members, who back a merger or split (the latter was omitted as a defence in 2003) initiated by the original political party, against bulk disqualification action.