August 10, 1998

Each Speaker can't interpret the Anti-Defection Act any which way he likes

After Uttar Pradesh, Goa. The political storm in the little western state re-emphasises the inadequacies of the Anti-Defection Act. The law itself is clear enough: a party is said to have split when a third or more of its MLAs or MPs break away. Any number less than a third constitutes illegal defection, not a legal separation. Unfortunately, the arbiter of a split is the Speaker of the House; and speakers are prone to strange behaviour. In Goa, for instance, Tomazino Cardozo effectively outlawed 10 MLAs who had left the Congress in what appeared to be a bona fide split. When Pratapsinh Rane's rump government sought a vote of confidence, Cardozo refused to let the 10 MLAs vote. As a result, Rane won a patently bogus majority. Later, of course, the governor intervened and dismissed Rane.

Compare Cardozo to Uttar Pradesh's Speaker. Kesri Nath Tripathi's approbation of the "split" in the BSP in October 1997 -- which enabled the BJP government to survive -- left constitutional experts gaping. Tripathi ruled that a third of the BSP's MLAs had split and, next, the new group had further split. Some MLAs -- no identities revealed -- returned to the mother party, he said; the rest backed the BJP. If Tripathi used a "two split" scenario to justify defection, Shivraj Patil introduced the term "continuous split" to the Indian political lexicon. As P.V. Narasimha Rao's Congress exercised its mergers and acquisitions options in the 11th Lok Sabha (1991-96) Patil, then Lok Sabha Speaker, facilitated the process by deciding that a party needn't split in one move. Rather, MLAs could break away over a period of time, in dribs and drabs. Truly, the Indian polity has been federalised. Every Assembly's Speaker can give the Anti-Defection Act his own special twist. Unfortunately, the law was designed to curb political immorality, not promote centrifugalism. It is obviously not working. Either take away the Speaker's authority and give it to the courts -- or dispense with the Act altogether.

Dribbling from Memory

The world doesn't owe Indian hockey a living. Upgrade or perish.

Contemporary Indian hockey wins no medals. Even so, it has a most original, if unstated, motto: "The future is yesterday." India's glorious hockey tradition, the magic of Dhyan Chand, K.D. Singh "Babu", Leslie Claudius and generations of others, was once its pride. Today, this history is an albatross around the neck. The mindset which governs what was once the national sport is antiquated, obsessed with the past and confoundingly confident that success only requires putting back the clock that much more. Most recently, the Indian Hockey Federation sacked V. Bhaskaran as national coach and replaced him with M.K. Kaushik. The ostensible reason was the team's failure in the World Cup. Nowhere else are coaches given only a few months to prove themselves. Ideally, they should have a three to four year contract, be allowed to reshape players and skills and then assessed. A mere change of guard, rather than one of policy, will achieve nothing. Before the year is out, Kaushik too is likely to lose his job.

The essential problem is two-fold. One, India looks to every new tournament as the one which will signal a revival, as if the ingredients for rejuvenation are already there. Two, all energies are focused on the national team. This ignores the decay at the junior levels. Players grow up on grass, are given lectures on the virtues of dribbling. When they graduate to international matches, they find themselves hopelessly obsolete in the speedy and athletic game played on astroturf. The Commonwealth Games are a month away. Other teams are preparing hard; India's has not even been selected. Instead, Kaushik has been given 51 players for a preliminary camp. After India gets the inevitable drubbing at the games, perhaps it will consider hiring a quality foreign coach for its under-16 squad -- and asking him for a bronze at the 2004 Olympics.

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