ADR and National Election Watch found that 111 sitting MPs and MLAs changed political parties after winning elections between 2022 and 2026, including 26 Lok Sabha MPs, seven Rajya Sabha MPs and 78 MLAs.
The BJP received 29 lawmakers, while the NPF accounted for 32, with ADR noting that the NPF cases arose from the NDPP-NPF merger rather than individual switches.
Nagaland recorded the highest number of cases with 32, followed by West Bengal with 20; ADR said its dataset may not be exhaustive because comprehensive official data on party switching is not systematically maintained.
At least 111 sitting MPs and MLAs changed political parties after being elected between 2022 and 2026, according to an analysis by the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) and National Election Watch. The study covers 26 Lok Sabha MPs, seven Rajya Sabha MPs and 78 MLAs across elections and by-elections held during the period.
Of the 111 lawmakers, 29, or 26 per cent, moved to the BJP, making it the second-largest recipient of lawmakers in the dataset. The Naga People's Front (NPF) accounted for the largest number, with 32 lawmakers, or 29 per cent, though ADR said these cases arose from a 2025 party merger rather than individual legislators switching parties.
The report, released on September 24, identified party-switching cases across 17 states and Union Territories. Nagaland recorded the highest number at 32, followed by West Bengal with 20, Telangana with nine, and Goa and Punjab with eight each.
ADR said its analysis includes not only conventional defections but also party mergers, lawmakers who resigned and subsequently contested by-elections on another party's ticket, and legislators who were disqualified and later won on a different party's ticket.
Who Were The 29 Lawmakers Who Joined BJP?
According to the ADR dataset, the 29 lawmakers who moved to the BJP included seven Rajya Sabha MPs and 22 MLAs. No Lok Sabha MP in the dataset moved to the BJP.
The seven Rajya Sabha members were Swati Maliwal, Ashok Mittal, Harbhajan Singh, Raghav Chadha, Sandeep Kumar Pathak, Vikramjit Singh Sahney and Rajinder Gupta. All seven had been elected to the Rajya Sabha on Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) tickets, according to the report.
Among the MLAs were eight Congress legislators from Goa, four Congress legislators from Gujarat and two from Himachal Pradesh. ADR also listed five JD(U) MLAs from Manipur as having moved to the BJP.
Other BJP entrants in the dataset included Samajwadi Party MLA Manoj Kumar Pandey of Uttar Pradesh, Congress MLA Nirmala Sapre of Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka politician G Janardhan Reddy. In Reddy's case, his Kalyana Rajya Pragathi Paksha (KRPP) merged with the BJP, according to ADR.
The report also lists Gujarat Congress legislators CJ Chavda, Arjun Modhwadia, Arvind Ladani and Chirag Patel as having resigned, joined the BJP and subsequently contested by-elections.
26 Lok Sabha MPs Among Party Switchers
After the NPF and BJP, the Nationalist Citizens Party of India (NCPI) accounted for 20 lawmakers, or 18 per cent of the total, according to the analysis.
The ADR dataset records 26 Lok Sabha MPs among the 111 party-switching cases. It also includes seven Rajya Sabha MPs and 78 MLAs.
According to the report, 20 Trinamool Congress Lok Sabha MPs announced their merger with the NCPI on June 14 after the party's defeat in the 2026 West Bengal Assembly election. The MPs also extended support to the BJP-led NDA in the Lok Sabha.
ADR said the NCPI had a limited electoral presence before the development. The party contested the 2023 Tripura Assembly election but did not win a seat. The report said the TMC MPs chose the merger route amid legal complications surrounding the formation of a separate parliamentary bloc.
Other recipients listed by ADR included the Congress with nine lawmakers, Shiv Sena with eight, the National People's Party (NPP) with six and the People's Party of Arunachal with four.
On the other side, the NDPP accounted for 25 lawmakers who switched parties, followed by the Trinamool Congress with 20 and the Congress with 19. Together, the three parties accounted for 64 of the 111 cases, or 58 per cent.
ADR said the 26 Lok Sabha MPs represented about 5 per cent of the 543-member House, while the seven Rajya Sabha MPs represented around 3 per cent of the 233 members covered by its analysis. The 78 MLAs amounted to about 2 per cent of the 4,100 legislators included in the comparison.
ADR said its analysis was based largely on election affidavits and publicly available information. It cautioned that the list may not capture every instance of party switching because of a “lack of systematically maintained and readily accessible official” Election Commission of India data.
The organisation describes itself as a non-partisan electoral-reform group founded in 1999 by professors from IIM Ahmedabad. It has also been involved in legal proceedings that led to Supreme Court directions requiring election candidates to disclose information including criminal cases, assets and educational qualifications.
Delimitation Push And Two-Thirds Mark
Many experts believe that the high turnover in MP's in the recent past could be partially attributed to the BJP's push for getting two-third's majority in the house to facilitate the passing of a constitutional amendment to enable the delimitation bill.
Changing political environments, specially the TMC's defeat and subsequent implosion, have also contributed to the back and forth of MP's and MLA's between parties.
The numbers showcased in the report also raise questions over the usefulness of the Anti-Defection Law. The ADR thus called for changes to be made to the tenth schedule of the constitution, which houses the Anti-Defection Law, and recommended that the disqualification decision be shifted to the President and the Governor instead of the presiding officer of the house.
