Magical maths in UP

The verdict, of course, was a foregone conclusion. With an admirable display of words running into some 148 pages and an astounding liberty with mathematics, the Speaker of the Uttar Pradesh Assembly, Kesari Nath Tripathi, formally recognised the Jantantric Bahujan Samaj Party (JBSP) as a legitimate breakaway faction of the BSP and dismissed the 24 petitions filed by BSP general secretary Mayawati, demanding their disqualification for defecting from her party. Only the very naive would have expected Tripathi to have come to any other conclusion than the one he did, given his record. He cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be accused of a scrupulous adherence to Constitutional propriety in his entire handling of the defection issue.

In fact, Chief Minister Kalyan Singh owes the `stability’ of his government, with its unwieldy cabinet of 90-odd ministers, to the adept manner in which Tripathi delayed giving a ruling on the matter. The delay had a two-fold purpose. Not only did it ensure that the votesof the rebel BSP members in support of Kalyan Singh were considered valid, it also left the door open for others from the BSP fold to gravitate to the ruling party so that their number could exceed the 23 MLAs required to constitute a formal split. The fact that 17 JBSP members subsequently found berths in the Kalyan Singh ministry reveals that defectors to the ruling party in UP are more than amply rewarded. Tripathi may have continued to defer his ruling on the matter if the Supreme Court hadn’t seen it fit to gently nudge him in the direction of delivering it. This January, the two-member Bench of the apex court, even while it recognised the absolute jurisdiction of the Speaker in the matter, emphasised the moral imperative of sorting out the defection issue at the earliest.

But Tripathi’s ruling, despite its rather impressive length, is deeply flawed. For one, he conveniently refuses to recognise the validity of the whip that Mayawati issued on October 20, 1997, on the specious grounds that no rules,regulations, bye-laws, constitution or resolution of the BSP were filed to prove her authority to do so. Tripathi also uses the obviously biased testimony of BSP rebel Sardar Singh saying that Mayawati had directed her party MLAs to create disorder in the Assembly on the following day, in order to rubbish the whip she issued. This amounts to rendering null and void the authority of the leader of the BSP’s legislative party. Further, while only 13 BSP rebels had voted in favour of Kalyan Singh on October 21, and they did not constitute one-third of the 69-member BSP party, the Speaker through remarkable sleight of hand maintains that a group of 26 BSP MLAs had been already constituted at that juncture, which later came to be known as the JBSP. This jugglery of facts, figures and sequences mayappear clever, but it is in fact nothing but a cynical justification for the most obvious legislative impropriety.