Anti-defection law has failed, opacity nahin chalegi

India has finally perfected a sport that requires no stadium, no referee, and no fans, because the spectators, also known as voters, are specifically kept out of the stadium. Call it the IPL of Indian politics, the Incredible Poaching League. In this league, the transfer window is always open.

Six of nine Shiv Sena UBT MPs have reportedly gone incommunicado , which in Indian political language is a polite way of saying they went very communicado, just not with their original employer. They appear to have found a chartered aircraft more persuasive than Sanjay Raut's rambling . Raut, a man who has raised alarm so many times he must be exhausted by his own decibels, claims the going rate is Rs 50 crore a head, with a Rs 15 crore advance delivered by nightfall. He says they refused to board the plane until the cash arrived. So this is what boarding passes look like now: half the money upfront and the soul in check-in luggage. In the IPL, this would be called a retention fee. Here, we call it a mystery.

Almost 20 TMC MPs (there's confusion whether the number is still in its teens), in their own Bengali entrepreneurial style, did not defect. They merely "merged" with a party called the National Citizens Party of India, a party so nondescript that even its acronym NCPI sounds like a form you fill at a government office and never hear back from. We know all rivers drain into the ocean. This time, an ocean drained into a river. The NCPI, a Tripura imagination headquartered in Howrah , is the transit lounge for MPs en route from one ideology to another. In aviation terms, this is a technical stopover. In sporting terms, this is a loan transfer. In democratic terms, this is an allegory.

The beauty of the NCPI manoeuvre is its constitutional elegance. You can't overnight change your seat from Hard Hindutva Hatred to I Heart Hindutva row. So parking yourself in an obscure regional party that promptly declares undying love for the ruling coalition is the best option available. She just changed her Facebook status to "It's complicated, but the NDA is very supportive".

The Aaya Ram, Gaya Ram of 1967 Haryana was quaint by comparison. Gaya Lal switched sides three times in a fortnight. Nobody paid him much beyond ministerial berth. Those were simpler, more innocent days of betrayal, when the transfer market was strictly a barter economy. Today's defection is a structured financial product with advance payment, monthly retainership, possibly a GST invoice marked "professional services rendered to the nation".

Every sporting league in the world publishes its transfer fees. The IPL displays every player's auction price on a giant screen in front of millions. The ISL, the Premier League, Pro Kabaddi, all of them are honest about what a franchise pays for a player's services. But here, the anti-defection law, passed in 1985 with great solemnity and patriotic rhetoric, has proved about as effective as a speed-limit sign on the Yamuna Expressway. All it did was stop retail defection and make wholesale mandatory. Every time Parliament plugged one loophole, the political class found two more.

Two-thirds of a party can merge and walk free. Resign before defecting and you are clean. Join a transit party and you are pristine. The rules were designed by politicians, which is roughly equivalent to asking Sansar Chand to draft wildlife protection policy.

The stock market publishes every transaction in real time. Property registrations are public record. Even your neighbour's electricity bill is accessible under RTI. The IPL publishes the full auction list within hours. But the price of an elected representative’s soul, bought by persons unknown using money of uncertain origin, is a state secret.

We got independence after a long struggle and chose and nurtured democracy for decades, and as things stand today, that democracy is in danger. The voter, the original franchise owner in this democracy, the person who actually funded the MP's salary through their taxes, the person who walked to a booth in cruel heat to press a button, gets precisely no information.

So here is my modest demand. Not abolition of horse trading, which is as likely as horses abolishing stables, and we need a stable democracy. I simply want a Rate Card. A publicly displayed, audited, SEBI-regulated, GST-compliant Rate Card. Put it on the Election Commission website. Update it quarterly. Break it down by category: Rajya Sabha MP, Lok Sabha MP, state MLA, municipal corporator. Note bulk discounts when you acquire two-thirds of a legislative party in one go. Please announce End of Season Sale in advance. Specify whether the chartered flight is included or billed separately.

The voter sold their vote at the cost of one biryani or one bottle or one saree, or ladka bhai or ladli behna, whatever the going rate or popular scheme. They had full information about the transaction. The politician sold his vote, which is the sum total of the voters’ votes, for crores, also a transac…