As the winter session of Parliament looms, I can’t help feeling depressed about the predictability of most parliamentary debates in the Lok Sabha these days.
The Narendra Modi government will propose. The opposition will oppose. If matters come to a head and a vote is called, the government’s brute majority will dispose.
The merits of the issue will matter little. There will be no reasoned attempts to persuade the other side; or rather, when such attempts are made by the well-meaning, they will prove futile, since persuasion, reflection and exchange are not the purpose of the exercise. Increasingly, parliamentary debates have become a ritual, the obligatory airing of opposing views, until the whip is cracked and MPs duly vote on party lines.
Even sensible suggestions by the opposition – with which the treasury benches do not in fact disagree – are never adopted, since to do so would be admitting the possibility of flexibility in government legislation in the Lok Sabha. The only time that opposition views are taken into account is when the outcome of the vote would otherwise be uncertain – like in the last few years, in the upper house. And now even that is changing as the Modi government is establishing a majority in the Rajya Sabha as well.
But in the Lok Sabha, secure in its overwhelming majority, the government simply chooses not to listen, or to listen with a closed mind. The idea of Parliament as a forum for collective deliberation and agreed outcomes has ceased to have any meaning.
There is very little real give-and-take in India’s parliamentary system, especially after the 1985 Anti-Defection law inaugurated a practice of party whips on all issues, making receptivity to the ideas of the other side punishable with expulsion from the House. What, one might ask, is the point of such debates at all, other than to nail one’s colours to the party mast? Why should a serious MP exercise his or her grey cells to come up with constructive suggestions, if they are never going to be considered, let alone adopted?
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Idea of an ideal Parliament
This was not how it was meant to be. Parliament, in the classic British conception, was supposed to be a forum where individual MPs of ability and integrity met to discuss common problems and come to agreed solutions. Anglo-Irish statesman Edmund Burke, in his famous speech to the Electors of Bristol on 3 November 1774, articulated most brilliantly and clearly the logic of parliamentary representation. Burke was addressing the issue of MPs being asked to advocate the wishes of their constituents, rather than themselves, but his logic also applies to the issue of MPs parroting their party lines. He is worth quoting in his own words:
“…It ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents [or here, if you prefer, read “Party”]. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinion, high respect; their business, unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasures, his satisfactions, to theirs; and above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own. But his unbiased opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure; no, nor from the law and the constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”
In other words, an MP betrays himself and his voters if he surrenders his own better judgement to the dictates of either his constituents or party leadership. As Burke explains, “government and legislation are matters of reason and judgment, and not of inclination; and what sort of reason is that, in which the determination precedes the discussion; in which one set of men deliberate, and another decide; and where those who form the conclusion are perhaps three hundred miles distant from those who hear the arguments?”
Burke’s final point is the clincher: “Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests; which interests each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates; but parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole; where, not local purposes, not local prejudices, [one might add today, “not party lines”] ought to guide, but the general good, resulting from the general reason of the whole. You choose a member indeed; but when you have chosen him, he is not member of Bristol, but he is a member of parliament”.
This goes to the nub of the entire issue. What is our conception of what Prime Minister Modi has called the “temple of democracy”? Is it merely a place to ratify decisions made elsewhere in party cabals or cabinet meetings, whose adoption is rendered inevitable by the previous Lok Sabha election results? Or is it a chamber where the representatives of the Indian people assemble to express their considered opinions and thoughtful disagreements, before coming to an outcome in the interests not of a political party but of the country as a whole?
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Death of individual liberty
The anti-defection law was passed with good intentions – the same good intentions with which, the proverb tells us, the road to hell is paved. It was intended to stop the Aaya Ram, Gaya Ram practice of legislators crossing the floor in pursuit of power and pelf, which saw state governments (and two central governments) between 1967 and 1985 rise and fall like skittles. The idea was noble, and rested on sound principles: governmental stability matters; politicians must stay loyal to the party on whose platform they contested; the intent of voters must not be betrayed by defections. When the law was first explained by its proponents, there was widespread support, even enthusiasm, for its passage.
But how has it worked in practice? It has dramatically reduced defections, but not eliminated them, as we have seen in Uttarakhand, Manipur, Goa and Karnataka in recent years. What it has done most effectively is to stifle the voice of the individual legislator. Since every single vote in Parliament sees a whip being issued, however trivial the subject of the bill, there is no room for honest differences of opinion.
Disobeying a whip offers grounds not just for disciplinary action by a political party, but expulsion from Parliament altogether. No MP who has struggled and strived (and spent) to get elected to his seat lightly places it in jeopardy. His convictions become secondary to the party line. The ‘argumentative Indian’ is often on display in both Houses, but only when an MP is arguing strictly according to his party’s position.
As a result, the anti-defection law has reduced each MP to a cipher during every vote, a number to be totted up by his party whip rather than an individual of ability, conviction and conscience. This outcome has other effects: it reduces the need for each MP to study an issue thoroughly and come to a position on it, since his own stand no longer matters unless that MP is part of the party leadership. In my experience, most MPs only study the bills they are assigned to speak on; the rest sees them dutifully voting as their party whip tells them to.
This is, in many ways, a travesty of the parliamentary process. In the UK, where the system originated, no whip was issued even on so fundamental a vote as to whether to authorise the government to proceed with the Brexit negotiations. Earlier, no whip was issued on whether the UK should support the US in the Iraq war. Dissent was freely and honestly expressed on both sides of the aisle. Such freedom is unknown to the Indian MP after the passage of the anti-defection law in 1985.
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The problem
Part of the problem is that the main provisions of the Constitution regarding the legislature were silent about the party system; the later addition of the anti-defection clause in the Tenth Schedule in 1985 was patently illogical since it sought to punish the undermining of an institution that was itself not mentioned in the main provisions. Surely the Schedule cannot override the main provisions of the Constitution?
Did the founders of India’s Constitution ever intend the party system to be paramount to an individual parliamentarian, obliging him to subordinate his conscience to the party whip?
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These are questions to which there are no real answers in today’s India. But it’s time we started asking them honestly.
The author is a Member of Parliament for Thiruvananthapuram and former MoS for External Affairs and HRD. He served the UN as an administrator and peacekeeper for three decades. He studied History at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University and International Relations at Tufts University. Tharoor has authored 18 books, both fiction and non-fiction; his most recent book is The Paradoxical Prime Minister. Follow him on Twitter @ShashiTharoor. Views are personal.