Congress Defectors to BJP Find Themselves Used and Dumped  

"While in the Congress you are a hero, when out, you become zero," Sitaram Kesri, during his long years as All India Congress Committee treasurer, used to say. How apt the statement is. Where is the flamboyant Ghulam Nabi Azad now? If he were to become a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP, would Shashi Tharoor be allowed to write beyond the routine Modi Stuti and Stotra?

Look at the graveyard of Congress defectors to the BJP, most of them forlorn and dejected: former chief ministers like Vijay Bahuguna, Capt. Amarinder Singh, Giridhar Gamang and Kiran Reddy and those like Rita Bahuguna, Kripa Shankar Singh and Dilip Ray. Others like Narayan Rane, R.P.N. Singh, Bhubaneswar Kalita and Ashok Chavan are whiling away their time as ordinary MPs. In the third group are Jyotiraditya Scindia, Biren Singh, Jitin Prasada, Radhakrishna Vikhe Patel and Tripura chief minister Manik Saha, who have been retained in higher positions because of their political utility.

In 2022, Rita Bahuguna offered to forego her Lok Sabha seat if her son Mayank Joshi was fielded as the BJP’s assembly candidate. Mayank did not get the ticket and joined the Samajwadi Party. Ashok Chavan’s brother-in-law and others deserted him and went back  to the Congress. Giridhar Gamang himself returned to the Congress. Odisha BJP leader Dilip Ray blamed a BJP leader for sabotaging his election. In Punjab, Amarinder Singh did not campaign for the BJP candidate.

Assam chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma has tried hard to impress Delhi. Jagadambika Pal, a Congress defector, was lucky he got Amit Shah’s nod to become chairman of the joint committee on the Waqf bill. None of the defectors has been able to break into the inner circle of the establishment though.

Consider the paradox. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has repeatedly lambasted the dynasty politics of the Congress, but a large chunk of Congress defectors to the BJP are dynasts. Jyotiraditya Scindia, Jitin Prasada, R.P.N. Singh, Rita and Vijay Bahuguna, Vishwamitra Rane, Sunil Jakhar, Ashok Chavan and Anil Antony were all pampered kids of the Congress.

For the first six years of the Modi regime, defections from other parties were an instrument to expand the BJP’s support base and to wreck and demoralise the Congress. The organised defections began in 2016 in Uttarakhand, where nine Congress MLAs quit the Congress, culminating in the fall of the Harish Rawat government. This was followed by Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur and Meghalaya.

Going by the Association for Democratic Reforms, 170 Congress legislators across the states defected to the BJP between 2016 and 2020. On the other hand, the number of BJP legislators who quit was 18. ADR had analysed the affidavits of 434 MPs and MLAs who switched parties and contested during that period. The percentage of turncoat candidates winning seats for the BJP is around 37%, while the party's overall strike rate is higher at around 54%.

The defections broadly belonged to three categories. First, individual leaders deserting what they believed was a sinking Congress and joining a burgeoning BJP for safer and better career prospects. Uttar Pradesh’s Jitin Prasada, who was made a junior minister, and R.P.N. Singh belonged to this category.

In the second are defections organised under Operation Lotus. Opposition-ruled states with a thin majority were the primary target. The ADR study reported that opposition governments in Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Manipur, Goa and Arunachal Pradesh fell because of the defections. The Congress-JDS coalition in Karnataka fell because a dozen Congress MLAs defected to the BJP in July 2019. Toppling bids continued in Karnataka even after the Congress formed a government on its own with Siddaramaiah as chief minister.

Last August, the Congress alleged that the BJP was staging another Operation Lotus with the support of the Enforcement Directorate and the CBI. It alleged that Congress MLAs were being offered Rs 100 crore each to switch sides. Earlier, the Congress ministry in Madhya Pradesh was pulled down when 22 MLAs of the Scindia group defected to the BJP. Shivraj Singh Chouhan was installed as chief minister. Within two weeks, a case of forgery of land documents against Scindia was withdrawn. Later, he was made a Union minister.

Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal, on his part, accused the BJP of offering a Rs 800-crore package deal for the wholesale defection of the AAM Aadmi Party’s 40 MLA s. This was a new initiative under Operation Lotus, he alleged, though it failed to click. The search of a car and the arrest of Jharkhand MLAs in Calcutta revealed a well-planned conspiracy to topple the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha government in Jharkhand.

In Maharashtra, a coordinated operation was conducted to hoodwink Shiv Sena MLAs. A section of them was taken around and finally stationed in BJP-ruled Assam. A similar attempt was made to wean away a group of MLAs led by Ajit Pawar to the BJP side. But Ajit was frank enough to concede the real reason: his MLAs were eager to get back to government to resume the ‘stalled’ development work.’ Ajit Pawar and his wife were being investigated in several corruption cases. Four out of nine rebel NCP MLAs – Ajit Pawar, Praful Patel, Chauhan Bhujbal and Hasan Mushrif – were being investigated by the ED in money-laundering cases before they joined hands with the BJP. Raj Thackeray pointed out that 10 days before Ajit Pawar became deputy chief minister in a coalition government with the BJP, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was quoted as saying he was involved in Rs 70,000-crore scam.

Soon, most of these cases were withdrawn by the agencies concerned. The benami land charges against Ajit were withdrawn a day after he returned as deputy chief minister, and the seized property was released. In the case of Praful Patel, the CBI filed a closure report in his Air India cases in March 2024. Three months later, he got back flats worth Rs 180 crore after the courts quashed the relevant ED cases.

In Goa, eight Congress MLAs defected in September 2022 even after a written pledge of loyalty, and a BJP government was installed. A series of ED/ CBI raids just before the Haryana assembly elections prompted the Haryana Congress president to say: ‘Wherever Amit Shah goes before elections, ED and CBI follow.’ This was in reference to the swoop on Congress workers soon after Amit Shah’s visit to Mahendragarh in July 2024.

Last year, Rahul Gandhi spoke of a defector ‘weeping’ in helplessness in front of his mother, telling Sonia Gandhi that he was leaving the Congress because he did not want to be jailed. A Jharkhand Congress MLA, Amba Prasad, said she had to face ED raids because she refused to join the BJP and contest the elections as its candidate.

Tailpiece: “Now ED won’t touch me,” Sanjay Patil, a Congress MP, said after his defection to BJP. He quoted his friend Harshvardhan Patil, who too had defected, as saying: “I now get sound sleep. As I am in the BJP, the agencies won’t dare ask me questions.”

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