Raghav Chadha, the Aam Aadmi Party’s former Rajya Sabha star, pulled off a high‑stakes political move by leaving AAP and merging with the BJP along with six other AAP MPs, but a little‑known private‑member Bill he once introduced could have blocked such a departure altogether. In 2013, then‑new MP Chadha tabled a bill in the Rajya Sabha aimed at closing the loophole in the anti‑defection law that allows legislators to escape disqualification when a “two‑thirds” bloc of a party’s MPs agree to a merger with another party. If that bill had been passed, the very constitutional escape route that now protects him and the six AAP turncoats would have been shut.
Chadha’s Bill proposed amending the Tenth Schedule (anti‑defection provision) to bar such mass “mergers,” effectively treating any move to join another party as a defection if even a single AAP MP did not sign on. The idea was to stop large‑scale, orchestrated exits that look like splits but avoid the usual penalties. The Rajya Sabha’s rules committee eventually recommended that the Bill be dropped, and it never reached a full vote. Had it become law, experts note, Chadha would have faced immediate disqualification if he tried to leave AAP alone or even as part of a small group, and the recent orchestrated exodus could not have been structured as a merger‑style exit.
For AAP, the irony is bitter. The party now plans to move a petition seeking the disqualification of the seven MPs under the existing anti‑defection law, arguing that the “merger” is a technicality masking betrayal. The case will likely rest on how the Rajya Sabha Chairman interprets the Tenth Schedule’s two‑thirds‑merger clause, a grey area that has long drawn criticism from legal scholars. The saga underlines how the current anti‑defection framework remains vulnerable to clever constitutional engineering, and why Chadha’s long‑forgotten Bill—meant to plug that very gap—now reads like a kind of political prophecy.
