Back to Business

Back to Business
Parliament finally returns to business after the complete washout of the winter session due to the stand-off over the 2G spectrum allocation issue. This was the longest shutdown ever. The Government has finally got a chance to explain in Parliament what it is doing about corruption and inflation- the two burning issues faced by the nation. However, the blame game for the loss of valuable 77 days of business and parliamentary practices continues.
Lament on the decline of Parliaments is not new. There is a sense of unease with the way the Parliament and the State legislatures are functioning. It is due to a decline in recent years in both the quantity and quality of work done by them. Over the years the number of days on which the houses sit to transact legislative and other business has come down very significantly. Even the relatively fewer days on which the houses meet are often marked by unseemly incidents, including use of force to intimidate opponents, shouting and shutting out of debate and discussion resulting in frequent adjournments. There is increasing concern about the decline of Parliament, falling standards of debate, erosion of the moral authority and prestige of the supreme tribune of the people. Corrective steps are urgently needed to strengthen Parliament's role as the authentic voice of the people as they struggle and suffer to realise the inspiring vision of a free and just society enshrined in the Constitution. Also, it is of the utmost importance for survival of democracy that Parliament continues to occupy a position of the highest esteem in the minds and hearts of the people.

The most important mechanism that diminishes Parliament is the diminishing individual legislator. An individual legislator is even more dependent upon the party hierarchy than in the past. No more than three or four leaders have any social base that allows them to be secure in the knowledge that they can stand their own ground against a party hierarchy. The individuality of MPs has also been effaced by the anti-defection law, which has made party whips ubiquitous. Parliament can do itself a great favour by endorsing the sensible bill introduced by Manish Tewari, restricting whips to only certain classes of issues. This will allow the individuality of voices to emerge, and MPs can be judged on their record rather than a party whip. Otherwise individual MPs will remain hostage to the phenomenon James Bryce’s in his Modern Democracies so colorfully described: “Moreover, the so-called ‘Party Machines’, which have been wont to nominate candidates, and on whose pleasure depends the political future of a large proportion of the members, prevented the will of the people from prevailing, making many members feel themselves responsible rather to it than to their constituencies.”
Parliament is taken seriously when leaders take it seriously; the House of Commons retains interest because the prime minister directly answers questions. We underestimate how much Nehru’s personal presence in Parliament elevated it. The second temptation is this: as the TRS legislators hinted, after the JPC episode, every party is now learning the lesson that blocking Parliament is an effective way of getting an obdurate government to respond.