Overview
- On Monday, July 27, the Supreme Court issued notice to the Union government on a writ by senior advocate and Rajya Sabha MP Kapil Sibal and tagged the petition with a pending Goa defection case.
- The bench of Justices P.S. Narasimha and Alok Aradhe said there are "enormous issues" with the Tenth Schedule and indicated many questions raised may properly be addressed by Parliament.
- Sibal asks the court to rule that Paragraph 4 cannot be read to allow a "deemed merger" where two‑thirds of a legislature party join another party without the parent political party formally merging, arguing this lets electoral majorities be reversed.
- Recent uses of the merger provision by lawmakers from the AAP, Trinamool Congress and Shiv Sena (UBT) to join rival groups have changed house arithmetic and prompted Speaker rulings and multiple legal challenges to those approvals.
- The government has been given weeks to reply and the case could lead either to a judicial narrowing of Paragraph 4 or push for legislative reform, a debate that Opposition MP Manish Tewari has asked the Lok Sabha to take up.