Lone warriors: Here're independent members of Parliament in Lok Sabha

The 17th Lok Sabha, which held its last sitting in February, initially had four Independent members of Parliament (MPs) within its ranks, including the customary Independent MP from Assam's Kokrajhar. Kokrajhar, a constituency reserved for Scheduled Tribes, has consistently elected Independents to the Lok Sabha since 1977, except in 2009.

The 10th Lok Sabha in 1991 had only one Independent MP, Satyendra Nath Brohmo Chaudhary, who was from Kokrajhar. From 1998 to 2004, Sansuma Khunggur Bwiswmuthiary was Kokrajhar's Independent MP in the Lok Sabha but represented the Bodo People's Front in 2009. In 2014 and 2019, the constituency's voters elected Naba Kumar Sarania as an Independent. Sarania's chances of defending his seat hang in the balance. On Thursday, the Gauhati High Court set aside a single-bench order that had given interim relief to Sarania in a case challenging his Scheduled Tribe (Plains) (ST-P) status. The case will come up for a hearing on Friday.

Another Independent MP Navneet Kaur Rana from Maharashtra's Amravati was more fortunate in her legal battle. The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld her Scheduled Caste status, setting aside a Bombay High Court order, enabling her to contest the Lok Sabha polls from Amravati, an SC-reserved constituency. The 11th Lok Sabha in 1996 had nine Independents, while subsequent Lok Sabhas in 1998 and 1999 had six each. This number reduced to five in 2004, increased to nine in 2009, and dropped to three in 2014.

In 2019, apart from Sarania and Rana, Mandya (Karnataka) MP Sumalatha Ambareesh and Dadra and Nagar Haveli MP Mohanbhai Delkar were the other Independent MPs elected to the 17th Lok Sabha. Rana recently joined the BJP and is the party's Amravati candidate for the 2024 polls. Sumalatha, a BJP-backed candidate in 2019, is unlikely to contest the polls as the BJP has allocated that seat to ally Janata Dal (Secular).

Delkar committed suicide in 2021 in controversial circumstances. He won the seat seven times between 1989 and 2019, including as a Congress candidate, a BJP representative, and an Independent. His wife Kalaben won the bypoll as a Shiv Sena candidate. She is the BJP's candidate for the seat for the 2024 Lok Sabha election.

Over the years, the number of Independents in Parliament has declined. There was a time when dozens of them won, bringing diversity and different viewpoints to the Lok Sabha. The record of Independents winning in Assembly polls was equally remarkable in the first few decades of India's nascent democracy.

In the first Lok Sabha, 37 Independents won. Their numbers were second only to the largest party, the Congress. The Congress won 364 seats, and the second largest party was the Communist Party of India (CPI), winning 16. In 1957, 42 Independents won, the highest ever. In 1962, 20 triumphed, followed by 35 in 1967, 14 in 1971, nine in 1977, 12 in 1980, five in 1984, and 12 in 1989.

A bunch of royals contested as Independents in the first election. The most prominent was Karni Singh, who won the Lok Sabha election five times as an Independent from Bikaner from 1952 to 1971.

V K Krishna Menon, India's defence minister when it annexed Goa and also during its defeat in the Sino-Indian War of 1962, was twice elected as an Independent - first in a by-election from Midnapore (Medinipur) in 1969, when the Indira Gandhi-led Congress denied him a ticket from Bombay, and two years later in 1971 Lok Sabha election again as an Independent from Trivandrum (Thiruvananthapuram).

Other interesting, even surprising, Independent MPs have been Harindranath Chattopadhyay — freedom fighter Sarojini Naidu's poet-brother who was later better known as Satyajit Ray's actor for his role in the classic Gupi Gayen, Bagha Bayen — elected from Vijayawada in 1952; educationist Madhav Shrihari Aney, the disciple of Bal Gangadhar Tilak from Nagpur in 1962 at the age of 82; LM Singhvi from Jodhpur in 1962; tribal leader Lal Shyamshah Lal Bhagwanshah in 1962 from Chanda constituency in Maharashtra, and quit two years into his term to protest the government's neglect of tribal rights.

In a bypoll in 1963, Bardhaman sent Hindu Mahasabha leader NC Chatterjee as an Independent and re-elected him in 1967. In 1971, his son Somnath Chatterjee won the seat, but on a CPI(M) ticket. George Gilbert Swell was an Independent from the Autonomous District constituency in 1962, 1967, 1971 and from the Shillong Lok Sabha constituency as an Independent in 1984 and 1996. Hindu Mahasabha leader Digvijaynath, the spiritual grandfather of Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, was elected as an Independent from Gorakhpur in 1967.

The Indian electorate often threw up surprises. In 1962, Indore elected trade unionist Homi Daji, a Parsi and a communist leader, as an Independent. Kanpur sent another trade unionist, SM Banerjee, four times from 1957 to 1971 as an Independent to the Lok Sabha. Dhanbad sent the founder of the Marxist Coordination Committee, A K Roy, to the Lok Sabha as an Independent in 1977 and 1980, while the Bombay South Central seat voters elected trade unionist Datta Samant in 1984 as an Independent.

The people of Srinagar elected Shamim Ahmed Shamim in 1971, editor of Aaina (Mirror), a good orator who passed away at the early age of 41. He would hold the Lok Sabha in rapt attention when he spoke. Once, he spoke of elections in Kashmir not being free and fair. An MP asked him how he could claim so when he had been elected as an Independent, defeating a former chief minister. "Sir", he replied, "if a plane crashed, and some people escaped miraculously unharmed, would you deny that plane has crashed?"