It has become something of a ritual now. A press conference. A garland. A new flag pinned to the chest of someone who, just weeks ago, swore their undying allegiance to a different one. Rinse and repeat.
We have watched it play out with TMC members crossing over the moment the political winds shifted. We saw it with MLAs from Uddhav Thackeray’s Shiv Sena and now with their MP’s— men who had campaigned for decades under the tiger’s paw — quietly packing their offices and walking out the door. AAP, the party that once sold itself as the antidote to everything wrong with Indian politics, is watching its own exodus unfold. These weren’t fringe members. Many of them were people who had spent years, sometimes decades, building these parties from the ground up.
And every time it happens, my phone buzzes.
“See? This is why you should switch.”
“Even the insiders are leaving. What does that tell you?”
“Be practical. Go where the power is.”
What makes this pressure particularly interesting — and, I’ll admit, occasionally amusing — is where it comes from. I am the grandson of Shri Mohanlal Sukhadia ji, who served as Chief Minister of Rajasthan for seventeen years, and of Smt Indubala Sukhadia ji, who represented Udaipur in Parliament. Politics is not an abstraction in my family. It is the furniture, the dinner table conversation, the reason we knew what a constituency map looked like before we knew how to drive.
And yet — or perhaps because of all that — I cannot bring myself to do what everyone seems to think is the obvious, sensible thing.
What Seventeen Years Looks Like
Shri Mohanlal Sukhadia ji did not hold Rajasthan for seventeen years by being convenient. He held it by being consistent.
The people who came to his office didn’t always agree with him. Some openly opposed him. But they knew, year after year, where he stood, what he believed, and what he would and wouldn’t do. That predictability — that willingness to be legible — was itself a form of governance. They could trust that the man they had voted for would be recognizably the same man when they came back four years later.
Smt Indubala Sukhadia, representing Udaipur through years when being an elected woman was its own quiet act of stubbornness, had the same quality. She wasn’t interested in performing loyalty. She simply had it — to the people who sent her to Parliament, to the ideas she’d stood on, to a vision of what that corner of Rajasthan could become.
I watched all of this growing up not fully understanding what I was seeing. Only now, watching MPs I once respected pin on new rosettes and smile at new cameras, do I understand what my grandparents were actually modeling.
What These Defections Are Really Telling Us
Let’s be honest about what we’re watching. When a leader who has spent fifteen years in TMC or Shiv Sena or AAP suddenly discovers that their “true ideology” aligns elsewhere, they are not having a political awakening. They are doing a calculation.
They are weighing ticket prospects, ministry berths, and survival odds. They are reading polls and talking to fixers and making decisions that have very little to do with the manifestos they once recited at rallies.
This is not a moral judgment — it is a description of incentives. Indian politics has always rewarded this kind of mobility. Anti-defection laws have more loopholes than teeth. And voters, despite their occasional outrage, have a remarkable ability to forgive yesterday’s traitor if tomorrow he controls the ration shop.
But here’s what we lose when we normalize all of this: we lose the ability to distinguish between someone who holds a position because they believe in it and someone who holds it because it’s currently profitable. That distinction matters — not just in politics, but in how a democracy understands itself.
On Being Told to Be Practical
When my family urges me to “be practical” about political loyalty, what they’re really saying is: don’t attach yourself to things that might lose. Don’t be the person still in the stadium after the match is over.
It’s sensible advice if you’re a politician. It’s less useful if you’re a citizen.
There is an irony my family doesn’t always acknowledge: Shri Sukhadia never had the luxury of switching when things got hard. He was the party in Rajasthan, in many ways. When the party struggled, he struggled with it. When it won, he won. His name was on the building — literally and politically. He couldn’t quietly transfer his loyalties to whoever was rising.
That kind of accountability — where your identity and your politics are genuinely intertwined — seems rarer now. What we have instead is a kind of political renting, where leaders occupy parties the way tenants occupy flats: comfortably, until a better offer comes along.
The Harder Question
None of this means that loyalty is always virtue. There is such a thing as misplaced fidelity — staying with something long after it has abandoned its own founding purpose, telling yourself it’s principle when it’s really just inertia.
So I try to ask myself honestly, whenever the pressure comes: Am I staying because I believe in something, or because leaving feels like losing? That’s the question that separates conviction from stubbornness.
So far, the answer has been clear enough.
But I’ve also stopped lecturing. The defectors in TMC and Shiv Sena and AAP are not villains in a morality play. They are people navigating a system designed to make loyalty expensive and defection cheap. I don’t admire the choice, but I understand it.
What I can’t do is make it myself.
What We Inherit
Shri Mohanlal Sukhadia ji served Rajasthan for seventeen years. Smt Indubala Sukhadia made the trip to Parliament from Udaipur through elections when very few women did. Neither of them did it for the winning. They did it because they believed that the ideas they stood for were worth the standing.
I am under no illusion that I carry their stature. I don’t hold office. I simply campaign and vote, and think.
But inheritance, I’ve come to understand, isn’t just property and surnames. It’s also the quiet, stubborn belief that what you stand for should mean something — that it shouldn’t evaporate the moment a rival party sends a better offer.
In a season of defections, holding that belief feels both deeply unfashionable and, I think, deeply necessary.
Even if it does make me the difficult one at dinner.
— Written by someone who grew up watching what seventeen years of commitment to a place actually looks like.