New Delhi: (Mani Shankar Aiyar is a Congress MP in the Rajya Sabha)What is billed as the last session of the current Lok Sabha commenced this week. Its progress over the first three days has been predictable. Neither House has undertaken any serious business. The prospects of any business at all being transacted are grim. We appear to be in the final throes of the Weimar Republic. The parallel bears reflection - particularly in the context of this being the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War.
Following the overthrow of Kaiser Wilhelm, and the abortion of the Bolshevik revolution that was attempted in the wake of the November 1918 armistice, leading German politicians gathered in the small town of Weimar to give themselves in 1919 a democratic, republican Constitution that presented their country an admirable parliamentary form of governance. It seemed to work quite well for a decade.
Then came the Great Depression, throwing up a flurry of repeated elections and a series of transient governments cobbled together from disparate factions. Through this period of aggravated instability, a failed politician called Adolf Hitler steered his much-discredited party to power, emerging as the Chancellor in January 1933. A few days later, a crazed Dutch communist, van der Lubbe, attempted to burn down the German Parliament building. Hitler promptly moved Parliament to an Opera House, and there proceeded to persuade Parliament to, in effect, dissolve itself and pass an Enabling Act that vested all power in the Nazi government. That ended the Weimar Constitution and Germany's nascent democracy. The rest is some of the nastiest history known to humankind.
Here, Parliament is rendering itself dysfunctional even without anyone attempting to burn down that beautiful Lutyens building. The dissolution is not externally caused but internally generated. For almost the entire term of the current Parliament, virtually no work has been undertaken, the number of days wasted on futile adjournments exceeding the number of days that Parliament has transacted the business for which it has been elected.
The sickness began with a man called SS Ahluwalia, a defector from the Congress, whom the BJP decided to name as their Deputy Leader in the Rajya Sabha. He had begun his Parliamentary career as the leader of what the media dubbed the Congress party's "shouting brigade" in Rajiv Gandhi's Rajya Sabha; then quit to take his talents for disruption to the other side. By the time I was nominated to the Rajya Sabha in March 2010, he had converted the Congress benches into the "silent brigade" as with his loud voice and barracking he disrupted the proceedings day after wretched day, reducing the chair to virtual impotence in restoring order.
Steadily, the rules book was thrown to the wolves and the Opposition began to dictate the proceedings - primarily to ensure that there were no proceedings. Most of the Opposition, whatever their individual misgivings, acquiesced in or actively collaborated in this usurpation by one Member of the rights of all other Members while the Chair waited for the House to become sufficiently unruly to adjourn the House.
Seeing how easy it was to demonstrate in the Well instead of debate in the Chamber, other Opposition parties started doing the same, the low point coming when two Telugu Desam MPs succeeded in holding up the Rajya Sabha for the entire Winter session of December 2013 in the face a hapless chair which instead of acting on its powers sought the "permission" of the Opposition (which by definition constitutes a minority of the House) to expel the two Members. The Opposition, in particular the BJP, vociferously rejected the "request", at which the chair relinquished the power and responsibility given to it by the House to ensure orderly proceedings. We thus have the spectacle of one or a few members, and always a minority, determining whether the House will run or not; what it will discuss; and how matters will, if at all, be discussed. The "sovereignty" of Parliament has been rendered the "sovereignty" of any member who invades the Well and holds the chair hostage.
Two important historical lessons from other parliaments appear to have been lost on us. One is the centuries-old practice in Westminster of separating the Treasury benches from the Opposition by a table whose width is determined by a sword's length to ensure that no Member on one side lunges with his sword at another on the other side. If we were to similarly ring-fence the Chair, disrupters would not be able to reach within screaming distance of the chair's microphones that are the only ones kept permanently open, multiplying manifold the lung power of the violators.
The second comes from the East Pakistan assembly in 1956 when someone flung a paper-weight that hit the deputy Speaker on the head, killing him on the spot. That opened the way to popular support for Ayub Khan ending Parliamentary democracy and taking over in a military coup two years later.
Before it comes to that in our Parliament, a round-table of all parties needs to be urgently called to re-write the rules so that plenty of room is provided for legitimizing disruption but allows also for genuine work to be accomplished. One way might be to give the day over to the disrupters and leave the night to the regulars. After all, the House of Commons normally sits up to 10 pm and often till midnight or later. We Members would lose some sleep - but that would be better than losing Parliamentary democracy outright to Ahluawalitis.
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