What Makes Parliament irrelevant?
*Jagdeep S. Chhokar
"Let me assure you that for 15-20 years now, we have been attending the elongated funeral rites of the parliamentary system." - Arun Shourie, in The Indian Express, September 18, 20121.
Before trying to discuss the factors that make Indian Parliament irrelevant, it may be worth spending some effort on making sure that it is indeed irrelevant because trying to find reasons for a something that does not exist is obviously a fruitless exercise.
The most eloquent testimony to the irrelevance of Parliament came from Arun Shourie2, as indicated in the quote above. Whether one agrees with Shourie or not, one cannot ignore his views. Wikipedia describes him as a "journalist, author and politician" but he is also a trained economist (with a Ph.D. from Syracuse University in the US). He is also a Magsaysay Award winner and was awarded the
Padma Bhushan, the third highest civilian honour by the Government of India way back in 1990. He has been writing on public issues and matter of public interest since around 1975. For him to make such a statement about the parliamentary system is undoubtedly significant.
The context in which Shourie was speaking is important. He said this during an interview in September 2012 when two sessions of Parliament had been almost completely lost due to pandemonium in the Lok Sabha, one on what came to be called the 2G scam and the other on the coal scam. Concern over the Parliament's lack of functioning was being expressed widely. This is exactly the time when a piece appeared in a newspaper titled Denigration of Parliament3.
The performance of the Parliament has been deteriorating over the years. In 1951, it sat for an average of 125 days a year. After 50 years, the average from the year 2000, has come down to around 70. The actual hours of sitting now hover between 70-75 per cent of the hours available, with occasional peaks amongst many troughs. While the time for discussions for Bills has obviously gone down, so has the number of Bills passed. That average number of Bills passed between 1952 and 1989 was around 65, which has fallen to around forty or below in recent years.
The performance in the year 2012 was particularly telling. In the Winter Session of 2012, the productive time in the Lok Sabha was 53% of scheduled time: i.e. 63 of 120 hours, and in the Rajya
Sabha it was 58% of scheduled time; 58 of 100 hours. The reason for this loss of productive time was frequent disruption of both Houses. The Question Hour was no different. The Lok Sabha was able to hold the Question Hour on only 11 of 20 days, and the Rajya Sabha on only 8 of 20 days.
The chairman of Rajya Sabha expressed concern over the continued disruption of Question Hour.
The Monsoon Session did no better, actually worse. The Lok Sabha was scheduled to meet for 120 hours and Rajya Sabha for 100 hours. However, the actual productive time was 24 hours in Lok
Sabha and 27 hours in Rajya Sabha. This made the Monsoon Session of 2012 the worst since the
Winter Session of 2010 when not a single day’s work could be achieved.
The 15th Lok Sabha (since May 2009 to Monsoon Session 2012) was the most disrupted term of the House in the history of Parliament. Productive time in this term was 67% of the total scheduled time4.
The situation in terms of the time spent on discussing Bills, which is supposed to be the main task of such Houses because of which they are called Legislatures, was even worse. The 15th Lok
Sabha spent less than five minutes each on discussing 20% of all Bills passed by it. A total of 20 Bills were passed in this manner. The Rajya Sabha did not fare much better. It passed six Bills after less than five minutes of debate each. Another nine Bills in the Sabha were passed in under 30 minutes of discussion each. The Rajya Sabha passed five Bills with under 30 minutes of debate.
This is the background that raises the question: What makes Indian Parliament irrelevant?
What Makes Indian Parliament Irrelevant?
The short, succinct, and real answer to this question is: Political parties. But such a short answer is hardly satisfactory and therefore needs elaboration. It may be useful to reformulate the question as: HOW do political parties make Indian Parliament irrelevant? To respond to this question satisfactorily, it is necessary to go in to some detail of how the Parliament is constituted.
The simple answer of course that the Parliament is constituted as a result of elections. Citizens at large have come to believe that it is they who “elect” Members of Parliament, which technically they do. But what happens in reality? Do voters really have a “free” choice? Consider the following.
What Choice Does a Voter Have?
Let us assume a constituency has 10 candidates for an election. Theoretically, a voter is free to vote for any of the 10. Assuming that the voter attaches some value to her/his vote, one would like to vote for a candidate who has a reasonable and fair chance of getting elected. This of course does not include some highly committed voters who will vote for a candidate even when they are absolutely sure that the candidate has no chance of being elected at all.
Experience and data show that the number of candidates with a reasonable and fair chance of getting elected in a constituency generally varies between two to four. And these two to four candidates are nominees of the major political parties active in that constituency or the state.
Theoretically, once again, it is possible for an independent candidate to get elected but data suggest that the number of independent candidates contesting elections and getting elected has been going down historically.
Red Alert Constituencies
There is yet another dimension to the choice that a voter has or does not have. National Election Watch (NEW) and the Association for Democratic Reforms5 (ADR) in their analyses of affidavits submitted by candidates as a necessary part of their nomination papers under a 2002 Supreme
Court judgment, also analyze the number of candidates with criminal cases pending against them in each constituency. A constituency which has three or more candidates with criminal cases pending against them is designated as a “red alert” constituency. This data shows that there were 183 red alert constituencies out of the 543, which works out to 34 per cent in the 2004 Lok Sabha elections. This figure rose to 242 in the 2016 Lok Sabha elections which is 45 per cent of the total seats.
So, in effect, the real choice the voters have is to vote for one of these two to four candidates “selected” by political parties – even if all of them have criminal cases pending against them! What it means is that a voter’s choice is pre-constrained by choices made by a set of political parties.
And the Parliament consists of such “elected” people.
How do Parties “Select” Candidates?
This is one of the biggest mysteries of the electoral and political processes of the country6. Many analyses have been attempted but there have been no consistent and reliable findings. The only conjecture on which there seems to be agreement is that candidates are selected on the basis of their “winnability”. Despite many attempts, it has not been possible to define what exactly winnablity is, or even describe it with any degree of specificity. Analyses have found it to have many components, which include but are not limited to the following: money, muscle (including a criminal past), caste, religion, sect, language, community. Curiously, considerations such as the person having worked among the people of the constituency or doing public service never seems to figure as a component of winnability.
Once the winnable candidates are selected through the mysterious process, they are given “tickets” by the parties which means an authorised representative of the party signs the nomination paper of the candidate with the official seal of the party confirming that the particular candidate is the authorised nominee of that particular party. The final decision of whom to give the “tickets” to, while being shrouded in mystery, is often attributed to what has come to be popularly referred to as the
“High Command”. The High Command has different operationalization in different parties. In most it is a single person who is also sometimes referred to as the Supremo. In some, it is a small group of two or three individuals. Of course, all parties claim to have committees who are supposed to make this decision, but everyone knows how it is done. One sure way of identifying who are real decision makers are to observe the size of crowds of ticket-seekers and their supporters outside the houses of major political figures. Usually the size of the crowd is directly proportional to the influence the resident of the house can bring to bear on the final selection of candidates.
Such a candidate gets the privilege of using the symbol that has been allotted to the party by the
Election Commission of India. Most parties also give varying amounts of money to the candidates to finance their election campaigns. Rumour has it that some parties actually take money to give “tickets” instead of giving money to contest elections! It is, of course, expected that some important leaders of the party will campaign for the candidate.
What do the so-called “Elected” Representatives do After Getting Elected?
This is a critical question. Simple logic would have us believe that since they are the “representatives” of the electorate of the area who have voted them to power, these “representatives” would have allegiance of the people of the area. But our “elected representatives” have longer memories and follow a deeper logic. Sure, the voters of the constituency voted for them to elect them, but they also remember that voters could vote for them only after the party gave them the “ticket”. So, their primary allegiance is not to the voters but to those who gave them the tickets – those who constitute the High Command or those who are the Supremoes.
It is not only deeper logic and long memories that make our “elected representatives” have their allegiance to the leaders of their political parties in preference to those who live in the constituencies that they have been elected from, our Constitution requires them to do so. More than 30 years ago, our Parliament passed the Constitution (Fifty-second Amendment) Act, 1985, which came into effect from March 01, 1985. It amended Articles 102(2) and 191(2) of the Constitution and added
Schedule Ten to the Constitution specifying that if a Member of Parliament votes against the “direction issued by the political party to which he belongs” he “shall be disqualified for being a member of the House.” In other words, if a Member of Parliament dares to vote against the wishes of the party, the member loses his membership of the Parliament.
If we combine this with the conclusion arrived at earlier about the choices that a voter has at the time of voting, we can state the following two fundamental propositions of Indian democracy as it currently functions:
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A voter’s choice is pre-constrained by choices made by a set of political parties.
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A so-called elected representative’s choices in Parliament are completely controlled by the political parties they belong to.
How do Political Parties Treat the Parliament?
The process of reducing the importance and value of Parliament started in the late 1960s and early
1970s. Leaders of political parties started displaying disdain for parliamentary proceedings by not attending sessions of Parliament and through their other behaviour. The days when the first Prime
Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, used to attend all sitting of Parliament, listening to debates and taking part in them, gradually passed into oblivion.
The year 2012 was a watershed in this process. The leader of opposition in one of the Houses of
Parliament stated that obstruction of the proceedings of Parliament was a “legitimate tactic for the Opposition to expose the government.” “The Opposition” seemed to be under the impression that
the best way to protect national interest was to not let Parliament function. There were far too many instances of such desecration of the temple of democracy during 2012. In an earlier instance the
Leader of the Opposition in one of the Houses announced in the evening that they would not allow the Parliament to function the next day. Disrupting Parliament and not allowing it to function, are arguably very grave offences against democracy, and thus against the nation. Such blatant and premeditated obstruction of the functioning of the highest body of democratic functioning, obviously lowers the importance of Parliament in the public perception.
Role of Presiding Officers
In addition to the total lack of respect shown by political parties, another important issue is the role of the presiding officers of the two Houses of Parliament. It is worth thinking about the duties and responsibilities of the presiding officers. Based on the experience of the last many years, it seems their duties and responsibilities are limited to requesting the members to take their seats, maintain decorum, observe silence, etc., and in extreme cases adjourn the House for two hours, till after lunch, or till the next working day. One wonders, is that all there is to it or should there be something more? It seems strange that the accountability of the presiding officers seems to be limited only to their electors, the members of the Houses, and not to either the House itself as an institution, or to the Constitution, or to what is best called “We, the people”.
How do Political Parties Function?
Since political parties actually, not only effectively, control what Members of Parliament do inside the Parliament, it is obvious that what happens inside Parliament is determined by all the political parties put together. That makes it necessary to understand how political parties function.
In a representative democracy such as India, political parties perform a very critical function, that of mobilising and consolidating public opinion on issues of public concern. Under normal circumstances, political parties function on the basis of some ideology. In the political discourse over the last many years, however, ideology seems to have become a concept which is completely alien to the entire political establishment. What political leaders think to be the purpose of political parties, is also a matter of concern. All actions of political parties seem to indicate that the only purpose for which political parties exist is to win elections, acquire state power, and then start working towards winning the next elections. The thought that one of the purposes of “coming in to power” is to govern or administer, does not seem to be a matter of concern for our political parties!
Even when some sections of the political establishment do think of governance, there seems to be a very serious disconnect between what the citizens expect from governance and what the political establishment expects from it. A common expectation, as reflected on the Wikipedia, is, “A reasonable or rational purpose of governance might aim to assure, (sometimes on behalf of others) that an organisation produces a worthwhile pattern of good results while avoiding an undesirable pattern of bad circumstances. Perhaps the moral and natural purpose of governance consists of assuring, on behalf of those governed, a worthy pattern of good while avoiding an undesirable pattern of bad. The ideal purpose, obviously, would assure a perfect pattern of good with no bad.”
Following this, citizens expect that governance by elected parties will lead to “good” outcomes for them; the citizens, and “bad” outcomes will be avoided. However, political parties which come to power as a result of elections seem to think that the essential purposes of “governance” are (a) to stay in power for as long as possible, and (b) to take all steps necessary to ensure winning the next elections.
Can Something be Done?
Can something be done to change the behaviour and functioning of political parties, so that they start functioning in a way that is productive for national and public interest?
The main reason political parties tend to overlook national interest in their narrow, self-interest is that they neither consider themselves as public institutions nor do they behave like public institutions. The root cause of this behaviour is the evolution of parties into fiefdoms, owned and controlled by a single individual or a coterie of persons. Given this structure and constitution, it is no surprise that the interest of a particular individual or group of individuals takes priority over everything else, including national interest.
This is also why the mere concept of being a public institution is an anathema to all political parties. It has become abundantly clear over the last three years, when six national parties have blatantly defied a decision of the Central Information Commission holding that they are public authorities under the RTI Act. They maintain that while they do have a moral obligation to be accountable and answerable to the citizens, technically they should not be covered under the RTI Act.
The solution to this doublespeak by political parties — when they say one thing and do its exact opposite, as when all of them claim to be the champions and defenders of democracy in the country while being completely undemocratic in their internal functioning — is to make them internally democratic by law. The Law Commission of India suggested this in 1999 in their 170th report, in the following words: “It is therefore, necessary to introduce internal democracy, financial transparency and accountability in the working of the political parties. A political party which does not respect democratic principles in its internal working cannot be expected to respect those principles in the governance of the country. It cannot be dictatorship internally and democratic in its functioning outside” (Para 3.1.2.1).
Since it is the representatives of political parties in Parliament who make laws, the trickiest part is getting Parliament to enact such a law. That is where the citizens and other public institutions such as the media and the judiciary need to put pressure on the political system.
*Jagdeep S. Chhokar is a former Professor, Dean and Director In-charge of Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, and a founder-member of Association for Democratic Reforms.
