The second half of the Budget session of Parliament has ended last week, not with a bang with a whimper, as slogan-shouting MPs prompted the Speaker to adjourn the Lok Sabha without a single serious debate. As the Congress Party’s designated lead speaker on the Finance Bill, I had done my homework and prepared enough points for a forty-minute speech. I would have been happy to have spoken even half that time, but the entire Bill, authorising our government to spend 45 lakh crore rupees, passed in nine minutes flat, without discussion, amid the cacophony of protesting voices by Opposition MPs.
It is one of the tragic realities of our times that the work of the ‘temple of democracy’, the Indian Parliament, has been reduced to a farce as both allies and supporters of the ruling party, and then members of the Opposition, repeatedly bring sessions to a standstill. What is new in this era is the phenomenon of disruptions orchestrated by the government, in order to avoid having to deal with awkward questions. It is compounded by the progressively downward trend in the duration of sittings, which, together with ever more frequent disruptions, have undermined the critical deliberative role of a Parliament.
The ruling party clearly regards Parliament as a necessary nuisance. You need a Parliament—first to form a government from its members and then to pass the laws you wish to impose upon the people. But having to deal with the impertinence of legislators’ questions and listen to their tiresome views on matters about which you have already made up your mind is an inconvenience to be avoided as much as possible. In the last few years, the government has been treating Parliament as a noticeboard for the announcement of its decisions and a rubber-stamp for legalising them, rather than as a consultative body in a deliberative democracy.
The government’s lack of interest in parliamentary accountability was brought home when, after Parliament was suspended because of Covid in March 2020, neither it nor its committees were allowed to be convened for months. While Covid provided a convenient excuse to have shorter Parliament sessions, the number of post-Covid debates on issues of national importance can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
In three terms in the Lok Sabha, my experience of disruption began in my first, when the BJP, then in Opposition, paralysed session after session with its clamour for resignations, for a JPC on the telecoms allocations, and for probes into various alleged misdemeanours of the UPA government. Its leaders were eloquent in justifying their behaviour: “It is a legitimate tactic for the Opposition to expose the government through the parliamentary instruments available at its command,” Arun Jaitley proclaimed memorably. He was righteous in his indignation at the charge that by disrupting Parliament he was not doing the work he was elected to do. “Disrupting does not mean not doing work. What we are doing is in fact very important work.”
As for the losses to the national exchequer from the disruption of Parliament, which was wasting crores of taxpayer rupees, Sushma Swaraj, the BJP’s Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, declared, “By losing Rs. 10–20 crore from loss of Parliament proceedings, if we can build pressure on the government, then that is acceptable.” Thus the BJP disrupted Parliament with impunity. In fact 68% of the time of the 2009–14 Lok Sabha was lost to BJP-led disruptions. It was hardly surprising that, in their turn, the UPA members decided to emulate their predecessors in Opposition.
Those of us who attended missionary schools learned the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The new Golden Rule of Indian politics has become: do unto them what they did unto you.
In a startling turnaround, the poachers have now become the gamekeepers. The very politicians who had argued the case for disruption—who had used sophistry and morality to obstruct the work of Parliament for years in the cause of the higher principle of accountability—suddenly decided that on this issue, where you stand depends on where you sit. Now that they are sitting on the Treasury benches, disruption is wasteful, even anti-national. Ironically, it was the BJP who had set the standards of parliamentary conduct they are now deploring. So when presiding officers from that party seek to suspend or expel Opposition MPs for the unruly behaviour that they themselves had practised when on the other side, what becomes of parliamentary democracy?
Parliamentary standards have been in free fall for a generation. The election of MPs has little to do with their parliamentary skills. No one is elected or defeated at the polls because of their performance in Parliament. Most MPs have limited interest in legislation and prefer to disrupt the proceedings rather than debate the principles. Meanwhile, the BJP government refuses to reach out to the Opposition and is content to ride roughshod over it to pass its Bills. Its contempt for the legislature is barely concealed. Unlike Jawaharlal Nehru, who attended Parliament daily, Prime Minister Modi barely deigns to grace the House with his presence. He has probably made more speeches abroad than in the Lok Sabha of which he is a member.
There is a simple solution possible: convene an all-party meeting and agree a new code of conduct that would be fair to both sides. Other parliamentary democracies allow the Opposition a day a week to raise the issues that matter to them. Bring in such a rule and in return, outlaw disruption, by mutual agreement. Parliament can then focus fairly on the nation’s business.
The selective expulsion of Opposition disruptors is no solution. I am all in favour of creating new standards of acceptable parliamentary conduct, but only by consensus with all parties. Expelling your Opposition is not democracy. But Mr Modi knows that: he has done precisely that, repeatedly, in the Gujarat Assembly, passing laws in truncated sessions with almost the entire Opposition suspended from the House. In his 2014 election campaign Mr Modi had boasted that he would apply the Gujarat model to the rest of India. We must not now allow his party to apply the Gujarat Assembly model to the national Parliament.
Shashi Tharoor
Third-term Lok Sabha MP from Thiruvananthapuram and the Sahitya-Akademi winning author of 24 books, most recently Ambedkar: A Life