Manish Tewari moves Bill to limit whip powers, seeks freedom for MPs in most legislative votes

Congress MP Manish Tewari has introduced a private member’s Bill in the Lok Sabha seeking to amend the Anti-Defection Law to allow parliamentarians greater freedom to vote independently on most legislative matters. The Bill, introduced on Friday, aims to curb what Tewari described as “whip-driven tyranny” and restore the primacy of individual lawmakers in the legislative process.

This is the third time Tewari has brought the proposal before the House, having done so earlier in 2010 and 2021. The Bill argues that elected representatives should not function merely as extensions of their party whips but as delegates of their constituents.

“This Bill seeks to return conscience, constituency and common sense to the echelons of the legislature so that an elected representative actually functions as the representative of the people who elected him and not as an instrument of a whip … transforming lawmakers into mere lobotomised numbers and dogmatic ciphers,” Tewari told PTI.

The draft legislation proposes amending the Tenth Schedule to ensure that MPs and MLAs incur disqualification only when they vote, or abstain from voting, contrary to their party’s direction in specific situations: confidence motions, no-confidence motions, adjournment motions, money bills and financial matters that directly affect the stability of the government. For all other bills and motions, lawmakers would be free to vote as they choose.

Under the proposal, the Speaker or Chairman would be required to announce any whip issued in these limited categories and inform members that defiance would result in automatic cessation of membership.

Lawmakers would retain the right to appeal such cessation within 15 days; appeals would have to be decided within 60 days.

Explaining the Bill’s intent, Tewari said the objective was twofold: maintaining governmental stability while restoring legislative agency to parliamentarians. He argued that many MPs no longer see themselves as active participants in lawmaking.

“A law is made by some joint secretary in some ministry… Then it’s put to a pro forma discussion, and as a consequence of a whip-driven tyranny, those on the Treasury benches invariably vote for it and those on the opposition benches vote against it,” he said.

Tewari contended that the excessive use of whips has hollowed out parliamentary debate, reducing legislators to “helots” of their parties. He traced the issue to the evolution of the Anti-Defection Law, noting that although the Tenth Schedule was introduced in 1985 to counter rampant floor-crossing, defections had merely shifted from “retail activity” in the 1960s to “wholesale” by the 1990s, and now amount to “mega mall activity”.

The Congress MP also proposed the creation of an independent judicial mechanism to handle defection cases. For Parliament, he suggested a tribunal comprising a division bench of the Supreme Court, with appeals lying before a five-judge bench. For state legislatures, original appeals would lie before a high court division bench, with further appeals to a five-judge bench and, subsequently, to the Supreme Court.

Tewari said that no other major democracy enforces such rigid whip systems and argued that meaningful legislative scrutiny cannot occur without the free exercise of parliamentary choice.