The Party in the Parliament : Mapping a Legislative History of Party Law in India

This paper charts the parliamentary history of the political party as a legal entity in India. The scholarly interest in 'party laws’ has witnessed a rise globally, especially in relation to growing worries of democratic backsliding and the need to regulate political parties (Daly and Jones 2020), with a normative focus on party regulation, party finance, and ‘party constitutionalisation’, both globally and in the particular case of India (van Biezen 2014, Sethia 2019). In this paper, I focus instead on an epistemological question: how has the political party as an entity (or ‘Party’) come to be what it is in Indian law? I argue for a need to focus on the non-electoral moments of the lives of political parties, to reimagine them, via their relationship to party laws, as organisations that are not just electoral competitors, but often co-producers of representative claims within a polity. Central to my claim is the idea that political parties are unique organisations within a polity: they legislate to create the laws that will govern and regulate them members. This is especially true for cases like India, with an Anti-Defection law in effect. Using an innovative interdisciplinary multi-method 'performance and politics' framework, I contend that the Party as it exists today in India is a product of incremental legislative meaning-making over decades. Mapping history through party law thus provides a unique perspective: Members of Parliament (MPs) across parties gather to debate laws that will apply to every party and Member. I follow from the works of Emma Crewe, Shirin Rai, Carole Spary, John Parkinson and others on politics and performance, particularly the mapping of performance and performativity within institutional spaces, to map the Parliament of India as a stage – with frontstages and backstages, scripts, and actors. A critical parliamentary history of Party legislation through a ‘performance and politics’ lens captures not just the outcomes but the processes of legislation and allows a reimagination of inter- and intra-party politics inside the Indian Parliament. I use archival data from the Constituent Assembly Debates (1947-49) and key legislative debates between 1951 and 2017 and supplement this data with narrative interviews I have conducted with current and former MPs across four selected political parties in India. This interdisciplinary history-writing exercise reveals how certain discursive tensions repeat over the decades in the cumulative creation of party laws in the Indian Parliament, along the narrative registers of political membership (to the party and to the parliament), 'service' (to the people and to the party), and 'loyalty' (to party versus to the people), and how this evolves over the decades to create not just the 'political party' as it must be regulated today for a repair of democracy, but also the figure/character of the 'Member of Parliament' in India today. From this, the paper extrapolates on the wider implications for the legitimacy of the Indian parliament, which has witnessed steady qualitative and deliberative decline (Rubinoff 2013, Shankar and Rodrigues 2014).