KOCHI: Question: Has it come to your notice that a team of vigilance officials had encroached the residence of the main culprit in the gold smuggling case and detained him forcibly? If so, please tell us the circumstances that led to such a situation?
Answer: Hasn’t come to my notice.
This exchange didn’t happen in a tea shop or in a bus station. The question was posed by Congress MLAs C R Mahesh, Anwar Sadath, Roji M John and I C Balakrishnan in the state assembly on Tuesday and the answer was provided by Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan who is also the minister for home and vigilance. How the home minister could feign ignorance to such an important issue which was covered live by visual media and followed actively by the print media only 20 days ago remains a puzzle.
On Monday, to another question, “Had the CM forgotten his baggage during the 2016 Dubai trip and was that later sent through an official of the UAE consulate?” Pinarayi answered, “The CM hadn’t forgotten to take his baggage.” This reply is also problematic as his former principal secretary M Sivasankar had testified before the customs team probing the gold smuggling through diplomatic channel case to such an episode.
“The question was whether the CM had forgotten his baggage. In fact, CM hadn’t forgotten his personal baggage and hence there is nothing wrong in the answer,” a senior official of the CMO said when asked about the anomaly.
The 140 elected representatives enjoy several privileges inside the assembly hall. They can ask any question regarding the state’s administration and the government is duty bound to provide factual answers at the earliest to all such questions. Everyday when the assembly is in session, there is a dedicated hour for answering MLAs’ questions. On the floor of the house, MLAs can raise corruption allegations without the fear of being sued for defamation. If an MLA faces legal action such as arrest when the house is in session, the official concerned needs to approach the speaker first for permission.
The deterioration in the standard of assembly proceedings over the years has been a matter of concern among lawmakers and academicians. A cursory glance at the questions posed by legislators in the last four sessions of the incumbent assembly will prove that a good chunk of them returned with the answer, ‘Information is being collected or data being compiled’. The MLAs will have to wait for several weeks, sometime months, to get this stock answer.
Legislators also need to share the blame for such fiascos. For instance, check the two questions cited here earlier. What if these were framed in a more meticulous manner? Adding the date of vigilance encroachment, name of the person taken into custody and proper details of the smuggling case mentioned in the first question would have cornered the CM and forced him to provide a detailed answer. Similarly, there had been tremendous scope for improving the quality of the second question too.
The audacity of ministers to give confusing and humiliating answers to MLAs stems from the fact that over the years, such lapses had not been addressed properly by the speaker and the Opposition. The powerful weapon of ‘breach of privilege’ can be used by any MLA if she feels that the answer is misleading. Had anyone relentlessly pursued a breach of privilege charge to take the misleading minister to task, that would have served as a deterrent to others. Unfortunately, new ruling front MLAs also don’t take such humiliations seriously and would rather compliment the smart strategy of the minister instead.
We had speakers like Vakkom Purushothaman and late Varkala Radhakrishnan who had treated assembly procedures as sacrosanct and often used their iron fist to get things in order. The crop of soft leaders like M Vijayakumar, Therambil Ramakrishnan, K Radhakrishnan, N Sakthan and P Sreeramakrishnan who succeeded them preferred a reconciliatory approach when such issues arose. The time is ripe for incumbent Speaker M B Rajesh to throw away the carrot and use the stick effectively to save the sanctity of the temple of democracy.