A month after elections in West Bengal, the TMC is staring at total disintegration as MLAs and MPs pledge support to the BJP. Just last month, seven AAP MPs joined the BJP. This has raised questions on the failures of the anti-defection law, the BJP’s use of power and resources to impose one-party dominance despite losing its majority in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. Is this a symptom unique to Indian politics? Why is this moment in history different from the Congress years? With institutional capture laying bare the electoral process, in the 12th year of the Modi government, how can we describe this moment of the Indian democracy?Gilles Verniers, political scientist and researcher at CERI, Sciences Po Paris recently told The Wire’s Sravasti Dasgupta why political parties splitting is worrisome for the Indian democracy.Below is their full conversation, edited slightly for clarity. It has been transcribed by Ayushi Singh, an editorial intern at The Wire.Sravasti Dasgupta: Hello and welcome, you’re watching The Wire. I’m Sravasti Dasgupta. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is celebrating 12 years of being in power. And if you take a look at the newspapers this morning or television media or even social media, you’ll see how the BJP is really celebrating Modi being the longest serving prime minister. Now, questions of course are being raised by the Congress on how this calculation has been reached. But that’s a separate matter. The fact is that as Modi celebrates 12 years in power, the latest is that smaller parties in India, the latest example being the Trinamool Congress are slowly disintegrating. This is a story that we have earlier seen in other states as well, whether it’s in Maharashtra or Madhya Pradesh or even in Punjab where the Aam Aadmi party’s several MPs have recently joined the BJP. So is the country now in a unique situation where the BJP is both in government as well as in opposition? To answer some of these questions, I’m being joined by Gilles Verniers, he is a political scientist and he’s come to our studio today. So, thank you very much for joining us. Before we get to answering the central question of whether the BJP is emerging as both the government and the opposition, let us first talk about what’s happening in the TMC. We know that after the elections – it’s been just about a month – and after the elections about 60 MLAs in the assembly have formed their own faction. Here in Delhi the MPs too claim to have support of about 20 out of the 28 MPs and they have pledged their allegiance to the NDA. Now we’ve seen this in the past, as I was mentioning earlier, but how would you characterise this? I was listening to a former TMC MP, Sushmita Dev, who just resigned a few hours before we were recording this interview. She has not formally joined the BJP or any other party but what she’s telling the media is that there is no “political opportunism” in politics, which I found quite interesting, so I wanted to ask you that do you see this churn in the TMC simply as political opportunism or is it engineered…?Gilles Verniers: Well, if that was the case then it would be a demonstration that there’s always something new to learn about Indian politics. Obviously there is a question of individual opportunism and opportunity. We know in the context of West Bengal that victories and defeats tend to be fairly total in the sense that a party that wins an election tends to capture the organisational machinery of its opponent and gets itself settled in power for quite a long time. And so now there’s an open desert in front of TMC parliamentarians and it’s not exactly surprising that many of them would wonder whether they would rather cross the desert for an indefinite period of time or whether they would want to make other decisions. But I don’t think that the situation we’re in, which is the question of a party split rather than individual decisions, can be summarised as simply the sum of individual decisions.We know historically party splits have happened a lot more in the past than in the present. It’s always the result of collective decisions. It’s always the result of some form of engineering by other parties and usually you look towards the party that tends to gain the most from these party splits. In this case there’s no mystery. The BJP does stand to gain from the division of one of the largest opposition parties and would gain parliamentary support in the process. SD: So because you mentioned that this is not a new phenomenon and a lot of the advocates of the BJP for instance would say that this is not something new that’s happening now even though the opposition is accusing the BJP of engineering all these defections and party splits…The old saying “Aya Ram gaya Ram,” happened in the Congress years but do you see any distinction with the present context and the Congress years? GV: Well, in the Congress years, you had huge amounts of defections that were engineered. The whole period of consolidation of the opposition happened first because the Congress party itself got split at different points in its history and from the period of alternation that we saw in the 1970s – in the 1960s in state politics before Emergency and after Emergency in national politics – we’ve seen a lot of back and forth. When Mrs. Gandhi came back to power in 1980 she gave a lot of tickets to candidates who themselves had been with Congress before so that kind of back and forth was really common. This is something that we see now. It tends to be greater when there’s a phase of dominance, when there’s really one strong dominant actor in the middle of the political game because that provides further incentives for people who find themselves at the margins to sort of enter the new mainstream, the new dominant party and so in a way the period now sort of replicates what used to take place in the 60s and in the 70s when the Congress was dominant. SD: So in that context one could say that a large part of this led to the anti-defection law in 1985. So, after close to 40 years, do you think the law has failed? GV: Anti-defection law clearly is defective in the sense that it’s not preventing the kind of political realignments that we are seeing and that we have seen in Indian politics for a long time. It was designed in the mid-80s to check a particular form of defection which was prevalent at the time, which was individual or groups within parties changing party affiliation after an election. But it did nothing to prevent anyone from resigning and waiting for the next election to change party affiliation or it did nothing to prevent parties from splitting. It actually creates a criterion which is the two-third parliamentary restraint criteria and, in a way, the anti-defection law provides a road map about what you need to do to achieve those kinds of defections.Besides what the anti-defection law did also was to introduce this principle of parliamentary discipline that guarantees sanction to parliamentarians who vote against their party or vote differently than their party directs them to. That has completely killed internal debate within political parties. That has killed parliamentary debate and the individual agency of representatives and has contributed to really stiffen parliament over time. So clearly the law is ineffective and unadapted to the forms of defections that we see, which are really defections in the name of individual or group-based resignations or in the case of party splits, as we see now with the Trinamool. SD: But what is interesting about the Trinamool is that now the case here is very different from, for instance, when the Shiv Sena or the NCP split. There they have made a claim for the symbol – ‘who was the original party?’. Here they are happy to stay as a separate faction both in the assembly as well as in parliament where they will be supporting the NDA or the BJP, but they will not be joining the BJP formally or joining the government formally. So is this a unique kind of a situation where we have two separate factions present in the house, one against the government, one for the government?GV: So factionalism within parties is consubstantial with the way political parties are organised now worldwide. Indian parties are not different from parties from any other democracies in that regard. The way these kinds of disputes would take place conventionally, you would have some form of leadership challenge from inside. Either parliamentarians or party leaders would use internal procedures to unseat a leader who it no longer or who has lost an election. But this would remain an internal process because the point is to retain the integrity of the party as a whole. Splitting a party by definition weakens that formation. At any rate, you create either two factions. I’m not quite sure legally what it would look like. Or you create two parties which by definition would each be smaller than the entity that they have split in the first place. But this is where Indian political parties and not just Trinamool but political parties in India in general are somewhat different, is that authority within these parties is hyper centralised, hyper-personalised. There is usually no procedure in place to challenge leadership within parties and so there is no internal democracy to talk about as such within Indian political parties.So that sort of creates no choice but to try your luck elsewhere or take radical routes such as splitting the party. SD: I know you spoke about how this was quite dominant in the 1960s and during Indira Gandhi as well. Recently an MP I was speaking to said that it’s very interesting that the BJP has created this situation where the BJP is both in government and in opposition. Is that a unique situation? GV: Well, I’m not quite sure that for the nation this is quite right. I’m not quite sure in what ways exactly it embodies its own opposition because the BJP is as centralised a party as any other and perhaps even more than others. And there’s no question that the leadership is highly personalised. And I’m not talking about the formal BJP president, but I’m talking of course of the prime minister. So, the idea that the BJP now would replicate a kind of internal factionalism that the Congress used to have, that’s not the case. The BJP is a far more cohesive party than Congress ever was. That’s for sure. I remember in the old Congress you had socialists, you had different factions, you had figures like Patel, figures like Karan Singh, you had people who incarnated different political streams. The Congress was this sort of umbrella organisation that sort of encompassed a range of ideological currents. That’s not the case with the BJP. It’s far more cohesive. Its political project is far more cohesive. Its ideological line is far more cohesive. So, in that sense, it differs quite a lot. SD: The other part is the institutional capture because yesterday we saw that the Congress’s Rajya Sabha candidate from Madhya Pradesh Minakshi Natrajan, her nomination was cancelled due to a certain problem in her election affidavit. Now she claimed that her advocates were not heard. The Congress leaders came to the Election Commission in Delhi. They were not allowed to enter for a brief period. There was a protest over there. But all that aside, the Congress is now saying that vote theft has now become seat theft. Now we have seen this in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections also. For instance, I had travelled to Indore and Madhya Pradesh where essentially there was no candidate. It was only the BJP candidate because all the other candidates including the Congress had withdrawn their nominations completely. We saw in Varanasi where the prime minister was contesting several candidates who had withdrawn their nomination. So how would you describe this particular phase of our democracy? I know you have written about Pippa Norris’s work earlier about institutional capture and the process of democracy. How would you describe what phase of democracy we are in? GV: I can’t speak for the particular case of Ms. Natrajan. But the question is whether you have fair and equal implementation of the rules across parties. The behaviour of the Election Commission these past few years seem to indicate that there is a partisan bent in the way they apply the same rules and the opposition is of course within its right to protest to protest against that. On the question of phase of which phase of democratic erosion or democratic decline – pick your word – we are in, we know from literature that democratic erosion is first and foremost an institutional process and that it’s also very gradual an institutional process because it’s about institutional capture, the decreasing willingness of independent institutions to exercise their mandate independently, the trampling of rules and the misuse also of institutions and institutional powers. And so, when scholars started writing about democratic erosion in India a few years ago, less than 10 years ago actually, the view was somewhat nuanced, right? They described India as a robust electoral democracy which had free and fair functioning elections but which had important liberal deficits in the way human rights were violated, in the way institutions were misused, in the way powers were concentrated, in the way power was personalised, and so forth. Then the BJP consolidated its majority. It won a number of elections. It also started accumulating and concentrating resources and exerting more and more pressure on institutions such as the judiciary, such as the media. It began concentrating much of the resources devoted to funding India’s political life in India and so India still had a liberal deficit. It still had free and fair elections. The conduct was still free and fair, but the conditions for free and fair competition were no longer met. Right? Parliamentarians would be selectively expelled from parliament. ED would be used and misused against opposition figures. Some of them would actually be jailed ahead of elections. I mean the list goes on. Now we seem to be in yet another phase of democratic erosion which is where the process itself – the architecture of election – becomes tainted and when elections no longer have an impartial arbiter presiding over them and there the onus has a lot to do with the Election Commission itself, with the way it behaves, with the choices that it makes, with the way it has to refuse to engage with its critiques, and with recent decisions to modify the condition of elections by altering deeply the composition of the electorate ahead of state elections through the special intensive revision exercise.There it creates a situation where there’s a really strong perception of a partisan bent from the institution that is supposed to be a guarantor of free and fair elections in India. So the literature tells us that you have sort of this gradual erosion of institutions and that’s the trajectory that India has undertaken over the past 10-12 years, whether it’s going to continue that would be the question, but a lot depends on what the opposition does and its ability to reverse the course and pose actual challenge to the BJP. SD: We’ll come to the question of the opposition and how it can reverse the channel in just a moment. But is this situation because of all these factors that you mentioned whether it is the Election Commission or the raids selectively used on opposition leaders or how elections are being conducted through the SIR. Is the BJP using its power, resources and institutions to manufacture one-party dominance despite the fact that it did not get a full mandate in 2024? I mean what is striking is that in 2024 the BJP loses its majority, stays in power by cobbling together a coalition, and the discourse at the time is really about the rebound of the opposition and sort of the inevitable trajectory of decline of Mr. Modi and his party. What we’ve seen the last two years really of state elections is that the BJP has indeed had a rebound in state elections and gone after its opponents with a vengeance, deploying all the resources, going after its opponent really aggressively, and engineering party splits. We’ve seen that in Maharashtra even though it was before 2024, we see that in West Bengal, but now you cannot attribute these resurgences of domination of the BJP solely to tricks, dirty tricks and misuse and abuses of power. There’s a larger context and there are a lot more factors that intervene in the manufacture, as you say, or the production of this dominance. The situation we are in today is as much the responsibility of the opposition than it is of the BJP itself. Why wasn’t the opposition able to capitalise on the gains that it had in 2024 is a question that needs to be asked to opposition parties too. We need not just blame the BJP solely for the well-being of a really successful party. SD: So we saw the INDIA alliance meeting two days back where the allies of the Congress are really asking questions. Though the INDIA bloc has been formed to take on the BJP, how the Congress which is the pivotal force really of the opposition is behaving with its allies is still a question. We saw in the Kerala assembly elections the Congress repeatedly attacked the national leaders of the Congress and attacked the CPI(M)’s leaders which led to some disenchantment over there, which was also raised. The DMK alliance of the Congress has ended. How that was handled was also questioned. So, despite all this of course, the Congress and the opposition needs to put its house in order. But the opposition also keeps saying that we have faith in institutions where institutions we are already seeing are in a state of disarray. So, what is the way forward? Is it mass movements like we have seen in the case of the Cockroach Janta Party?GV: Well first it’s not my place to tell India’s opposition what it should do. All I can do is make observations and one observation that I can make is that it treats its alliance more as an electoral alliance than a political alliance. What I mean by that is that an opposition alliance has to be more than coordination meetings ahead of an election, sea cheering and some sort of a common minimum program. There has to be consultation and deliberation about how to run the opposition between elections and to have consultation and consultation of partners before major decisions. So if the Congress had approached the DMK saying, ‘Look we’re very sorry you lost the election, now Vijay’s party doesn’t yet have its majority so we need to help him consolidate to avoid an even messier situation.’ Perhaps some form of understanding could have been reached. Instead they have to learn from it in the press, which is really not how you treat your partners. They’ve been in the opposition so long that one would think that they would have learned how to conduct themselves as faithful opposition and coalition alliance partners, which doesn’t seem to be the case yet. So, there’s a lot of introspection that has to take place. It takes hard work. It takes a lot of political practice. It takes experience. It also takes a willingness not to compromise. The Congress tends to be very demanding in states where it doesn’t really have a strong political footing anymore. It still wants to contest every election everywhere, including where stronger regional parties are also contesting, instead of concentrating the limited resources that they have to the states where it has to contest the BJP face to face. So, all these are decisions that of course are up to the Congress party to make. But there seems to be a need for a more consistent opposition that also works hand in hand between elections. Now with regard to the Cockroach Janata Party, it’s obviously too early too soon. It is a social movement born from Gen Z mobilisation. It is distinct from political parties and that’s probably for the best for everyone. What I would note is that previous phases of opposition gathering in the face of a dominant player were successful because they were preceded by a strong social movement. Think about the JP movement, right? The Janta coalition was as pragmatic and as opportunistic as any alliance has ever been in Indian politics. Of course, the leadership level they were determined to restore democracy after the emergency but it collapsed on its own due to internal bickering and factionalism and the incapacity to basically work together. But what made it successful is not so much the seat sharing or the political arithmetic or the electoral map arithmetic and so forth, but the fact that it was preceded by a social movement. This is not something that we’ve seen in India. There have been social movements – at least three important ones – in recent years which have insisted that they had nothing to do with elections or electoral politics. Therefore, opposition parties sort of failed to bank or capitalise on the discontent that expresses itself through this movement and the resentment and the mobilisation potential that emerged from it. This is not to say that they have necessarily to work hand in hand but it’s easier to win elections when you already have a presence on the ground, when you mobilise people on issues on a day-to-day basis.SD: As in the case of the Aam Aadmi Party and the IAC to a certain extent?GV: To a certain extent but also as in the case of the BJP.BJP we know is in permanent electoral mode but it’s also sustained by its own social movement which is the RSS, which is the Sangh Parivar, which is this galaxy of organisations that do its day-to-day canvassing through the diversity of work that they do. But it sort of prepares the ground for electoral mobilisation. Many opposition leaders, including regional opposition leaders, are pretty much absent between elections and that’s a strong limited factor for these parties SD: And finally I want to ask you that with all these smaller parties which were earlier – even in the 2024 elections the DMK and TMC were considered to be strong regional satraps – have kind of fallen aside the TMC is disintegrating the TMK has fallen out of its alliance with the Congress. Now other smaller parties we are seeing ahead of elections in Punjab seven Rajya Sabha MPs from the Aam Aadmi party have joined the BJP. Shiv Sena and NCP already know what has happened. So how do you see all this really impacting the 2029 elections which are just about three years away? Do you see this as BJP preparing the ground for that?GV: Well, by definition, the BJP is always on the ground, always preparing the ground, always preparing for the next election. In a way, they’ve already campaigning. They’re already campaigning for the 2029 election, and that’s obviously a really strong comparative advantage that they have. It does complicate the life of opposition parties when so many of their members are joining the party in power.For the most part these are still individuals. In some cases, of course, parties themselves are splitting. The question is not so much the individual people moving from one party to another but it’s the organisational capacity. Does the BJP recuperate the organisational capacity of their opponent by poaching individuals or are these individuals basically joining basically on their own and on their own strength and resources that I would imagine the situation varies quite a lot from one state to another and from one party to another? And what we know from Indian candidates is that they are highly replaceable or dependable right political parties can always come with new candidates. The splitting of parties is more worrisome because it is a destructive force in Indian politics and it seriously hampers the ability of opposition parties to actually do their job because opposition parties do have a job which is to raise issues and point at limits in the action of the government.That sort of clearing of the ground is worrisome because it’s actually quite unhealthy, right? You can’t have a political stage that is so dominated. Now the problem is that it’s the result of many factors, right? And it is not just the BJP in its headquarters sort of pulling the strings and deciding who gets in, but as I said, regional parties and opposition parties also have issues of their own. The Congress party has a number of issues of its own. It’s also the result of a larger political culture where all parties have been recruiting candidates from the same sociological pools of local elite or individually wealthy candidates who have incentives to stake their own resources for arguably really short careers. And so candidates from a sociological point of view are pretty undifferentiated between parties and that obviously this political class in India is quite homogeneous in that sense class wise and that’s what facilitates those transfers those realignments these changes of affiliation we know that ideology or ideological differentiations between party is hardly an effective cement for party organisations, right? Because parties are super centralised, because they are internally authoritarian, they are also as a result, really fragile. There’s no problem when the parties are doing well, when they are dominating in their respective states like the DMK and the Trinamool were until a few weeks ago. But in the wake of a defeat that’s where you might jump ship pretty easily. But there’s a number of systemic factors that intervene and that sort of facilitate that kind of behaviour. SD: In all this we must remember that it is the voters who are left feeling a little concerned and worried – where did their vote really go as politicians, MPs and MLAs continue to switch parties. And that’s a question I think all politicians need to think of. Thank you so much for joining us. We leave it at that and thank you to our viewers, for watching.