Aristotle believed that the strength of a republic ultimately rested on the character of those who governed it. Montesquieu warned that political power, left unchecked, had a natural tendency to expand beyond its kosher limits. And Edmund Burke, while defending the independence of elected representatives, reminded them that they owed their electors not merely their jobs but their judgement. Nearly two and a half centuries after Burke, India’s democracy has arrived at a rather different question: how much should the people have to pay for those who exercise power in their name?
John Locke believed that the purpose of government was to preserve the rights of those who entrusted it with power, while Burke saw representative government as a solemn understanding between the elected and the elector. Neither imagined that democracy would one day acquire the institutional paraphernalia of a corporate establishment, with its own expanding hierarchy of salaries, allowances, vehicles, houses and privileges.
Yet that is precisely the uncomfortable reality India is facing. When Tamil Nadu Chief Minister C Joseph Vijay announced that all 234 of the state’s MLAs would be provided government vehicles, Rs 75,000 a month for fuel, maintenance and driver expenses, and another Rs 25,000 for an assistant, he may have intended to strengthen the capacity of legislators to serve their constituents. It’s going to cost over Rs 200 crore for a full five-year term. With this, Vijay has inadvertently reopened a much larger debate about the price of representative government and, more importantly, about whether the growing cost of political office is acquiring the contours of transactional politics.
There is a perfectly legitimate justification for providing lawmakers sufficient means to perform their responsibilities. An MLA is expected to travel through a constituency, attend public meetings, meet officials, inspect schemes and respond to thousands of individual grievances. Many of Tamil Nadu’s legislators are first-time representatives and may not possess the personal resources of established politicians. But somewhere between legitimate assistance and political largesse lies a line that democratic governments cross with increasing frequency. A facility meant to enable public service can easily become a perk which, once granted, has a remarkable tendency to become an entitlement. The citizen is meanwhile expected to accept that public expenditure must be restrained, subsidies must be rationalised and government departments must economise. The contrast is becoming increasingly difficult to defend.
It’s not a Tamil Nadu phenomenon alone. Bihar provides another revealing example. The ruling political establishment in Bihar has been remarkably expansive. Just before the state elections, it sanctioned additional official accommodation and the construction of new residential facilities for legislators. Governments change, parties change and political rhetoric changes, yet once power is acquired, the political class appears to rediscover a common fraternity: better cars, better houses, better salaries and better facilities for those who occupy legislatures. The citizen is perpetually reminded of fiscal prudence and the legislator, rather more often, of what the public purse can provide.
That is why the question cannot be reduced to whether MLAs or MPs are paid too much. They must be paid adequately. The real issue is whether the compensation attached to public office bears any relationship to the responsibilities discharged by those who receive it. The paradox is that the political class has become more expensive while the legislature itself has become less deliberative.
State Assemblies have, on average, been meeting for only a fraction of the year, with several states recording extraordinarily low numbers of sitting days. Parliament has not been immune to the malaise. Sessions are increasingly punctuated by adjournments, protests, walkouts and partisan confrontation, leaving insufficient time for the sustained examination of legislation, expenditure and executive decisions.
No one should imagine that the quality of democracy can be measured in terms of number of sittings alone. But when legislative time diminishes while political privileges expand, the citizen is entitled to ask whether the two trends can indefinitely coexist. According to unofficial estimates, the exchequer spends over Rs 2,000 crore annually on 4,200-odd MLAs and 788 members of Parliament. In addition, they are also given an amount varying from Rs 1 crore to Rs 5 crore to spend on amenities in their own constituencies. There isn’t any credible evidence whether such a massive discretionary expenditure by each of them has made our villages or small towns a better habitat than before.
But there is an additional irony. The Indian voter is perhaps the most unforgiving auditor of political performance. Sitting legislators are routinely defeated, anti-incumbency remains one of the most powerful forces in Indian electoral politics. Yet the citizen has almost no effective mechanism during the five-year term to demand an account of how much public money is being spent on an elected representative and what measurable public service is being delivered in return.
This does not mean that the answer is austerity for legislators. A poorly-paid politician can become more susceptible to corruption, patronage and private influence. The answer lies in establishing a more credible compact between privilege and performance. If legislators are provided vehicles, their use should be transparent and auditable. If they receive assistants, the expenditure should be accounted for. If constituency funds are placed at their disposal, every project should be traceable.
If salaries and allowances are increased, there should at least be a parallel expectation of attendance, committee participation, legislative scrutiny and productive sitting days. They are leveraging their legal legislative power in their favour. Now, they are paid more for doing less work.
The danger is not that India will be bankrupted by luxurious elected leaders. The danger is that political privilege will gradually become normalised across parties and states until nobody remembers to ask where necessity ends and indulgence begins. The language of public service can then become a convenient vocabulary for private comfort, while the taxpayer is left to finance an increasingly elaborate architecture of power. India must spend money on democracy. But democracy cannot be judged by how generously it treats those who govern. It must ultimately be judged by how responsibly those who govern treat the money, institutions and trust placed in their hands. A mature democracy should not merely ask whether it can afford its politicians; it must periodically ask whether its politicians have earned the extortionate price of being afforded. India’s democracy is staring at a rather contrastive question: does India need a paid or a performing democracy?
Read all columns by Prabhu Chawla
prabhuchawla@newindianexpress.com
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