What's Essential & Where To Begin?

What ails Indian Parliament? Rather than evoking simple answers, the question raises more questions. Can Parliament work for people when politics is fuelled by money and muscle power? Is Parliament the sole custodian of democracy? If the Parliament is sick, are the other institutions relatively healthy? What about the judiciary, the executive, the party system, the President's office or the media? For me, the question conjures up conflicting emotions. My India shines when I compare us with a dictatorship or a dysfunctional state, of which there are many in the neighbourhood.But I feel embarrassed when I reflect on where we could have easily been. I feel great when the world admires India's colossal election exercise which has improved consistently over time. But the satisfaction vanishes when I see the kind of leaders this splendid system churns out. I cheer when the courts expose corruption and cronyism but feel ashamed when the judiciary is charged with corruption and nepotism. But the most disturbing thing for me is to witness the decline of the grand institutions such as our Parliament. The founding fathers of our Constitution saw Parliament as a moral authority as much as a legislature. For Nehru, Parliament was like a badge of India's commitment to democracy. Despite the flaws, the Indian Parliament still represents the legitimacy of the political system, never mind how chaotic things might appear to be. It has evolved a political culture of its own: of non-violent political contestation. If the chaos and pandemonium in the House can absorb dissent and avert conflicts on the street, the disruptions we detest so much may not be such a bad thing after all! The Parliament is also an apt mirror of the Indian society. So, in spite of the decline in standards, it still mirrors the diversity of India, its chaos and contradictions, its plurality of public interests. It works, deep-down, as an emblem of India's unity in diversity, as a metaphorical link between the state and its diverse people. Indian Parliament can work as a bridge between our democracy and the constitutional values of Justice, Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. And that is why it is imperative for our generation to preserve its legacy and to halt its decline. Let me stick my neck out and diagnose some ills as they come across to me. The biggest concern about Indian Parliament is that from the first decade of its existence,the quality of everything has fallen, right from the decorum of the House to the standards of deliberations to the output of legislative business. This means that the quality of laws being passed could be substantially better with more meaningful debates and less brinkmanship. The least said is best about the quality of members elected. But the flip side is that the character of Parliament today is more representative of wider India than it was in the forties and fifties. The social character then was more elite with a fair share of MPs belonging to better educated, upper caste, and upper class, backgrounds. Today this composition has undergone a sea change, and thankfully so, with more and more members coming from plebeian, dalit and OBC, backgrounds. This has coincided with a democratic upsurge among the marginalised communities which are a lot more aware of their interests than they have been in the past. Full marks to all political parties for giving tickets to more and more subalterns but no marks for giving preference to thugs, rabble rousers and deep pockets on the basis of winnability. This is a classic example of one step forward and two steps backwards! In many ways the idea of representation itself has changed along with changing demographics. Originally, each constituency was supposed to represent roughly the same number of electorate.

However, today the largest constituency, Malkajgiri in Telangana, represents almost 30 lakh voters while the smallest, Lakshadweep - a Union Territory, represents just under 50,000 electors, according to the Election Commission of India data released in 2014. The EC data says that the total electorate size in the largest five constituencies is over 15 times of the smallest five. If we were to level out population-wise delimitation (say be dividing Malkajgiri into two), we would end up punishing those states which have succeeded in implementing family planning at the cost of those who have failed miserably. In other words, UP and Bihar may get the gift of more constituencies, which may not be acceptable to, say, Kerala or Karnataka. Another big concern is the stagnation of the parliamentary committee system, a time-tested tool of healthier deliberations. It is well-known that in Indian politics the game of numbers takes precedence over principles or ideologies. A robust parliamentary committee system circumvents the number game for wider consultations. It ensures that every legislation passes through layers of discussions between diverse stakeholders, irrespective of the majority of a single party in the House. However, the new norm is that rather than addressing flaws, the ruling parties are in a hurry to get a legislation passed by hook or by crook, and with minimum involvement of ad hoc, standing or other committees provided in the system. One of the reasons why even good MPs cannot make a big difference is that the political parties obsessively control their flock. Individual members can hardly take a nuanced position on a legislation, even on a moral ground, because disobeying the party line can cost them their membership of Parliament. The anti-defection law ensures that the parties are able to keep a stranglehold on individual MPs as discussed at length in this issue of Common Cause journal. So it is the parties and not the representatives who call the shots in Parliament and state assemblies. But let us face it, India's political parties fallow a highly regressive and undemocratic systems of internal governance. Candidates are picked not from the cadre of active members but from a pool of loyalists, family members, aids and acolytes. The membership is offered on anything but ideological ground, sometimes by giving a missed call to the party president! (Of course the 'members' are forgotten as fast as they are aggregated by a computer generated algorithm). Then there are established rules of the game. For instance, arch enemies from hostile parties are most welcome to join -- and to get rewarded for backstabbing rivals. High stake splits and mergers can attract even better rewards. The rule of thumb is that one-upmanship would always prevail over party's principles. So what happens if the business as usual continues? Where do we begin the parliamentary reforms? We believe that in India a process of simultaneous deepening and shallowing of democracy is going on. We can lament the failures but, arguably, things are also improving in many crucial areas. But it is equally true that the system's entrenched interests are hard at work to nullify these gains. We also know that one constructive change leads to more success, provided we treat reforms as a continuum rather than as an event. And hence, the issue of parliamentary reforms is linked to judicial, administrative, economic and electoral reforms, among others. But a good place to start would be to change the way our political parties function. This issue of Common Cause is dedicated to Indian Parliament. Curated by Anumeha, the articles by known experts seek to provide a perspective on what is not working or what needs fixing. Please send in your comments or suggestions to feedback@commoncause.in

-Vipul Mudgal