Wherever he goes, Vice President of India and chairman of Rajya Sabha M Venkaiah Naidu makes it a point to give lengthy preaching on defections.
He strongly advocates that if any elected member of the legislature of a particular political party wants to defect to any other party, he should quit his or her membership in the legislature.
Otherwise, such defectors should be disqualified from their membership immediately, he said several times.
Venkaiah also issued an official order, asking the presiding officers of all the states and even Lok Sabha to decide the issues of disqualification of MPs within a period of three months.
He opined that the Speakers of the legislative bodies (assemblies or councils or Lok Sabha) should not keep in pending or drag for years the petitions of disqualification of the defected legislators or MPs.
In December 2017, Venkaiah disqualified two senior Janata Dal (UP) MPs – Sharad Yadav and Ali Anwar – from Rajya Sabha.
But on Thursday, Venkaiah quietly accepted the defection of four Telugu Desam Party MPs—Y S Chowdary, CM Ramesh, T G Venkatesh and Garikapati Mohan Rao within minutes and got them merged with the BJP.
One wonders why he did not ask the defecting MPs to quit their membership before joining the BJP.
The answer is simple: the rule does not apply to the BJP, which can encourage and engineer defections at will. The rule applies only to the opposition!
