Mumbai: Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla on Sunday announced a committee to look into constitutional provisions that underpin the anti-defection law for elected representatives, appointing Maharashtra assembly speaker Rahul Narwekar as its head.
The committee will look into the 10th Schedule of the Constitution and recommend changes. The anti-defection law contains provisions to disqualify MPs or MLAs if they switch their political allegiances, unless the defection involves at least two-thirds of the elected members of a party.
“The conference discussed various issues related to the working of Parliament and Legislatures. The 10th Schedule was one such issue. There was a committee under CP Joshi which gave its report on the issue. There was a detailed discussion on the 10th Schedule in the Uttarakhand matter and to take the debate forward now we have decided to form a committee under Rahul Narwekar, speaker of Maharashtra assembly,” said Birla at a press conference after the two-day meeting of the 84th All India Presiding Officers’ Conference (AIPOC) concluded in Mumbai.
The committee has not yet been formally announced. The details of its members and timelines was therefore not available.
The choice of Narwekar, a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MLA, is significant since he recently ruled on the fate of the breakaway faction in Shiv Sena, which split in June 2022 when Eknath Shinde broke ranks with then CM and party chief Uddhav Thackeray.
Shinde, claiming support of over two-thirds of Sena MLAs, were ruled by Narwekar on January 10 to be the real Shiv Sena, which is now in the ruling alliance with the BJP and a breakaway faction from the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) led by Ajit Pawar.
Narwekar is also examining similar petitions filed by Sharad Pawar-founded NCP against the outfit led by Ajit Pawar, who has staked claim to the NCP name and the party symbol claiming support of more than two-thirds of the MLAs.
