Law Unto Themselves - (Sulekha.Com, 09/11/2002)

-- By Dasu Krishnamoorty

Three days ahead of schedule, presiding officers of both houses of Parliament announced the end of the monsoon session, unable to resolve the standoff between the government and the opposition. This adds a new, although sad chapter to the 50 years of Free India's Parliament, witness to dignity and decorum earlier generations of parliamentarians imparted to house debates. The bedlam that Parliament is today has become a model to state legislatures too.

As institutionalized voices of the people, Parliament and state legislatures have lost their shine, evident from the disuse of the forum for debate and lawmaking. Parliamentary performance in the last ten years has crystallised into a tradition of waste, greed and obstructionism. The ruling party and the opposition now alternate roles in preserving and refining upon this tradition. Every opposition acts as though it would never occupy the treasury benches and become victim of the same tactics it is now employing against the treasury benches.

Session after session, important bills wait for their turn and bills introduced get past without discussion, including money bills. The guillotine claims the remaining bills. Each wasted minute of Parliament costs the nation Rs 17,000 and each wasted hour Rs 1 million. The taxpayer's money goes into indulging this aberrant play of passions and filibuster. Beyond Parliament there is no machinery to which the people can appeal to bring order to its proceedings.

What the legislators do or do not in Parliament and legislatures is now part of parliamentary history that TV and video cameras record faithfully. Every voter watches the performance of his representative in the house and feels free to repeat it elsewhere. Shouting each other out, tearing of legislative papers, rushing to the well of the House, staging sit-ins, uprooting mikes for use as weapons, walkouts, and what else, are now common scenes. Decibel power and body language are used as substitutes for argument and elucidation.

The poor attendance in both Parliament and state legislatures is a measure of the lawmakers' commitment to their constituents. Quorum is precariously managed by taking the attendance at the beginning of the session, once in the morning and again after lunch. Voting with such quorum can only be called manufacturing consent. TV channels, showing commotion in the house when crucial bills are waiting to be discussed, have failed to restore dignity in the house. Repeated disruption of legislative business to accommodate doubtful agenda suggests a serious bankruptcy of issues and obsessive enthusiasm for acrimony.

Many candidates regard entering Parliament as entering a mint. It is no more a place where lawmaking is the main business or where issues concerning the people are raised. Every contestant jumping into the electoral arena knows that a five-year term is a term of power and privilege. Salaries, whether of an MP or a MLA, are peanuts compared to perks, allowances and privileges they enjoy. These are not enough. So, a committee headed by senior Congress leader Pranab Mukherjee concluded that members' salary structures warranted a revision.

Besides salary, members get daily allowance, constituency allowance, transport allowance, office expense allowance, a liaison officer for the constituency, allowance for meetings, medical insurance, pension after they retire, 25,000 units of free power, hundred thousand free local calls on two telephones, 50,000 free calls on a third for Internet and train and air travel. Yet, a BJP member Vijay Goel asks, "All MPs need a stenographer, a computer operator, a personal secretary, two peons, two cars. Is the money we are getting sufficient for all this?" 

Even if an MP uses the telephone 24 hours a day, without doing anything else, he would make only 175,000 calls. There is a war between the southern MPs and northern MPs about the telephone calls they can make. The southern members argue that when they call their constituency from Delhi or vice versa, they use up more free calls than their northern colleagues do since they are close to Delhi. Another BJP member, Radhakrishnan from Coimbatore, says, "One lakh (hundred thousand) free calls are too insufficient by any standards and should be increased to at least 1.5 lakhs." In return for these comforts, what do they do for the people they represent?

Legislators no longer make only laws. They make news. Responding to a farewell felicitation by MPs, outgoing President K.R. Narayanan gave a bit of discreet advice to them: "As the elected representatives of the people, you must abide by values and set for yourselves higher standards of public behaviour." The Supreme Court was more forthcoming. When the counsel for some Muslim organisation began airing their points of views, the judges reprimanded the counsel saying, "This is not Parliament where one could go to the well of the House and raise the voice. Counsel would get the opportunity at the next hearing."

The new Speaker Manohar Joshi chided members to behave or face suspension. When members tried to raise various issues like the arrest of MDMK leader Vaiko in Tamil Nadu, Joshi said, "Frequent adjournments, besides, leading to wastage of the precious time of the House, tend to lower the dignity of Parliament in the eyes of the public." Fali Nariman, Rajya Sabha member and a constitutional expert, says, "The people's representatives should value the enormous amount of public money being spent on running Parliament."

According to one estimate, the ten-day standoff between the treasury and opposition benches on the censure motion in Parliament's summer session cost the nation an avoidable Rs 210 million. Every session is an opportunity for lawmakers to call the government to explain how people's money is spent and for what purpose. Attritional debates lead to guillotine which automatically abridges discussion and government's duty to explain. After unproductive heat and acrimony eat into legislative time what remains hardly produces meaningful discourse.

Most lawmakers are now active outside the legislatures, globetrotting, cross-voting, intimidating and generally doing things punishable under the Indian Penal Code. Legislators are struck by wanderlust. Early this year, groups of MPs fanned out to different countries on the planet to sensitise opinion-makers there about India's stand on terrorism and to make sure that Indian concerns are seen as part of the global fight. Led by P.A. Sangma, they visited Brussels to meet the European Parliament.

Another batch led by Najma Heptullah toured Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Another team went to South Africa, Nigeria and Senegal while a delegation led by V.K. Malhotra visited Egypt, Jordan and Syria. There is no evidence to show that the labours of these delegations bore fruit. For all their pains, neither has the scale of terrorism come down nor are countries separating terrorism from the Kashmir issue.

A few months later, another group of MPs led by Deputy Speaker P.M. Sayeed took off for Britain, Austria, France and the United States to study the security arrangements there including car-scanning devices employed by the House of Commons in London and the Capitol Hill in Washington. A pilot party of bureaucrats preceded this delegation. As the new millennium began, 50 MPs fanned out to different countries.

Hot on the heels of an 11-member delegation that returned from Mauritius, a delegation led by G.M.C. Balayogi left for Prague. They had already visited France, Jordan and Rio. In the pipeline at that time were plans to travel to New York, London and Jakarta. To disprove gender bias, 17 women MPs took off for New York to attend a UN conference on gender equality.

MLAs are no mean tribe. What MPs do, they also can do and actually do better. Andhra Pradesh is at the top not only alphabetically but also in terms of performance. In May, four batches, each of 61 MLAs, flew to China, Korea, Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore. That accounts for 253 legislators in a house of 293 members. The tours are supposed to help the lawmakers see the changes taking place in the host countries in the area of economic development and relay their impressions to the state government. They spent four days in China and two days each in other countries. The MLAs also did a lot of shopping and sightseeing. In the two-week tour, they hardly had a week to study industrial and economic development in the five countries. What did they see and what did they report? Did they report at all?

In June, while Haryana Chief Minister Omprakash Choutala was scouting for investments from NRIs in the United States, 21 members of the Haryana legislature were touring the land of opportunities. They came to learn farming practices in the United States. Every year, some group or the other of lawmakers acquires wings and flies off to some corner of the world to study some aspect of development or just make what is called a goodwill visit. So far, there has been no record of what benefits flowed from these tours to the country or the concerned states.

State governments benefit from the experience of other states. Therefore, in a mutual give and take, they send and receive teams of legislators, the entire administrative machinery waiting on them. Members of Parliament have the upper hand in claiming hospitality from state governments. The rulebook prescribes details of what the MPs are entitled to during their journeys but the rulebook never rules. The MPs have their own rules. Last year, a delegation of MPs came to Mumbai to study the status of scheduled castes and tribes in public sector undertakings (PSUs).

They refused to stay in PSU guesthouses, preferring the Oberoi Hotel. The Shipping Corporation of India, the State Bank of India, the Mazgaon Docks, Indian Oil, the Canara Bank and the Bank of Baroda paid the bills. The same delegation stayed at Le Meridien in Chennai, Hotel Ashok at Madurai, Hotel Carlton at Kodaikanal and Hotel Residency at Coimbatore. After this two more delegations of 61 and 59 MPs, representing the standing committees on External Affairs Ministry and the Ministry of Commerce visited Mumbai and stayed at Hotel Taj. The people are the losers when legislators abjure their fundamental mandate.

Here are some headlines which are self-explanatory: PCs for Ministers, MLAs on easy terms(The Hindu, 21 March 2000), Gujarat MLAs misuse house plots(The New Indian Express, 10 Sept. 2000), MPs want funds for constituency doubled(The New Indian Express, 1 April 2000), Look for your MP, he must be abroad(The New Indian Express, 30 June 2000), Teachers are taxed, but look at what bureaucrats, MPs get(The New Indian Express, 9 Sept. 2000), Rajya Sabha MP booked for attempt to murder(India Weekly-USA 23 June 2002).

The government deserves congratulations for putting its foot down on a request of the MPs to double the MPs Local Area Development Fund from Rs 20 million to Rs 40-50 million. It had already been doubled once in the past. In spite of the bitter hostility between the treasury and opposition sides, they readily agree to any plan to increase their salaries and perks. Increasingly, Parliament is becoming a stage for power play and politics by other means. It should save itself from becoming irrelevant.

Instead of travelling to exotic locales, legislators can tour their constituencies whenever Parliament or legislatures are not in session. Instead of stalemating the business of the house indefinitely, in the name of Gujarat or Babri Masjid, they could lead peace (and harmony) marches to troubled spots in the manner of Gandhiji and Vinobaji. Conflict, conflict and more conflict is the theme that defines the performance of our legislators today with a view to catch the eye of the TV cameras. A great symbol of democracy is in peril.