Shiv Sena (UBT) moves SC against Speaker's recognition of MPs' merger with Shinde faction

THE MERGER THAT NEVER MERGED THE PARTY

Paragraph 4 of the Tenth Schedule sets a two-part test for a defection to be legally protected as a "merger": the original political party must merge with another and at least two-thirds of the legislature party must agree to it. What is actually happening in the Shiv Sena (UBT) case satisfies only the second half of that test - and the entire legal fight is about whether the second half can survive without the first.

What the Text Actually Requires

Read literally, Paragraph 4 protects legislators only when their party organisation - the one that gave them a ticket, ran their campaign and owns the symbol they were elected under - itself merges into another party. The two-thirds legislature-party threshold was meant to be a safeguard on top of that organisational merger, confirming that a genuine, party-led realignment has enough support among elected members.

It was never designed to be a standalone route to escaping disqualification.

Where the Loophole Opens

What has actually happened is the reverse: six MPs, on their own, declared themselves merged with a rival party - one Shiv Sena (UBT) itself contested against in 2024 - while the Shiv Sena (UBT) organisation continues to exist, contest elections and use its own name and symbol.

Kamat's argument to the Court captures the mechanism precisely: legislators are substituting the "legislative party" for the "original political party" in the merger test, treating their own two-thirds majority as sufficient on its own.

Once a Speaker accepts that substitution, the organisational-merger requirement becomes optional in practice, even though the constitutional text never removed it. This is not a hypothetical concern confined to one Lok Sabha bench.

Kamat told the Court such mergers are "happening all over the country"

• and a nearly identical dispute over the Goa Assembly, brought by Girish Chodankar, is already before the same Court. That parallel matters: it shows this isn't a one-off dispute over six seats, but a repeatable technique any legislature-party majority can use against its own organisation, anywhere in India, as long as a sympathetic Speaker signs off quickly. That last point is where Kihoto Hollohan (1992) becomes relevant - it made the Speaker's disqualification decisions subject to judicial review precisely because the Speaker, as a political office-holder, is not a neutral umpire by default. The Shiv Sena (UBT) petition is really asking the Court to use that judicial-review power to test whether "merger" was satisfied in substance, not just recognised on paper. For the exam, the sharp point to hold onto is this: the controversy is not about whether defection can ever be legitimate - Paragraph 4 already permits it under conditions. It is about whether a Speaker can certify a "merger" that only exists at the legislature-party level, while the actual political party the voters elected remains legally intact and organisationally separate. Until the Supreme Court rules on that question, this same fact pattern will keep recurring.