Senior Supreme Court lawyer and independent Rajya Sabha member Kapil Sibal on Saturday cited the law to say that Friday’s purported merger with the BJP of a two-thirds membership of AAP Legislature Party in the Upper House was unconstitutional.”This merger is not possible in the law. It is against the Tenth Schedule of the Constitution,” said the lawyer-politician.He read out the provisions of the relevant Sections of the Tenth Schedule and said it clearly states that for any legislature party merger to happen, first the merger at the level of the political party is a must.”It cannot be the other way round,” Sibal said, adding that Friday developments have nothing to do with the law or the Constitution and were simply a reflection of the decay of ethical standards in Indian politics.Sibal accused the ruling BJP of perpetrating political fraud to dismiss elected governments and drew parallels between defection of seven AAP MPs with the defection by the Eknath Shinde-led faction of the Shiv Sena MLAs in Maharashtra who also likewise merged their legislature party with the BJP and later earned the symbol of the actual Shiv Sena.”That is exactly what happened yesterday,” Sibal said.He said the anti-defection law is simple and recognises a merger only if the political party at a national level—in this case AAP—calls a meeting at the organisational level and passes a resolution to merge with the BJP.”First the parties have to merge. After that the question of the fate of MPs comes. If two-thirds MPs of a given party which has merged with another decide to honour the merger, then the legislature party can also merge as the principal party has merged. But it cannot be that two-third MPs merge with the BJP without the AAP merging with the BJP at an organisational level through a resolution. This is not the law,” Sibal said.He however added that the defection by seven AAP MPs, including Raghav Chadha, Sandeep Pathak, Swati Maliwal and others, was a purely political move engineered by the BJP.On the future course of action, Sibal said the AAP can file a disqualification petition against the defectors but that matter will take at least five years to get through India’s legal rigmarole.”By then it is possible that a similar split would have happened in Punjab,” Sibal said.