On The Spot
Tavleen Singh
Since I write this column on the morning that the Election Commission announced the dates for the general election that will elect the 16th Lok Sabha the most appropriate subject I can think of to write about today is a taking of account. There could not be a better day to calculate what Indian parliamentary democracy lost and gained during the time of the 15th lok sabha. Did the men and women we elected last time around fulfill their duties to those who elected them? Did they raise the standards of debate in that house that is the highest temple of democracy? Did they make laws that improved our lives? How will history remember the 15th lok sabha?
Let me begin by answering the last of these questions first because to it there is the shortest of answers: very badly. Not just because there were so many disruptions and so much noise and chaos but because this lok sabha virtually abdicated its responsibilities in the law making department. This happened for two reasons and the more important of these is that because of Sonia Gandhi being India’s de facto prime minister and because of her National Advisory Council (NAC) being our de facto cabinet the business of making laws appeared to become more the business of the NAC than the Lok Sabha.
So it was from the NAC that we got the law that guarantees employment and the law that now guarantees cheap food grain to more than 700 million Indians. There were other laws, of equally dubious merit, that emanated from Sonia Gandhi and her council of NGO ministers but I mention these two in particular because I believe they could bankrupt India in the future without doing much by way of reducing India’s hideous poverty. No future government will be able to get rid of these at some later date either because it will be too afraid of being seen as ‘anti-poor’.
Our tragedy is that these very bad laws when handed by the NAC to the 15th lok sabha for approval got passed without more than token resistance from the opposition parties. Had opposition MPs questioned their efficacy, had they pointed out that the hundreds of thousands of crore rupees being spent on Lady Sonia Bountiful’s pet schemes could be much better spent on providing clean water, good schools and roads and creating real jobs in rural India the 15th lok sabha may have left something that could be described as an achievement. Sadly this did not happen. Not much else happened in the lawmaking department that will be remembered as a proud legacy.
The second way in which the law making responsibilities of the 15th Lok Sabha were seriously undermined was by Anna Hazare and his Jan Lok Pal movement. No matter how worthy Anna’s cause, no matter how sincere his desire to rid India of corruption, he should never have been allowed to influence the making of an important law unless he was an elected member of the 15th Lok Sabha. But, because the Sonia-Manmohan government so badly botched up the handling of his hunger strikes and did him the huge favour of throwing him in Tihar jail the only compensation that could be offered by the government was to humbly accept the need for a Lok Pal. Once more the opposition failed to put on public record any objections. Once more members of the 15th Lok Sabha failed to point out that the reason why the Lok Pal bill had remained pending for forty years was because its efficacy was in serious doubt.
It still is. There are enough laws in India to punish corrupt officials so a new law is not what is needed but administrative reforms that would make it much harder for corrupt officials to indulge in corruption. Instead we have been bequeathed a new institution that will do little more than create an additional layer of bureaucracy in a country in which there are already too many officials. It should have been the job of those we elected to the 15th lok sabha to stand up against a law that will in the end probably increase corruption rather than reduce it but no voices were heard raised in protest. This brings us to one of the questions I asked in the first paragraph of this piece: did this lok sabha make any laws that improved our lives? The answer can only be, no.
As for memorable debates that students of history can one day turn to in search of valuable information about the mood of India at the time of the 15th lok sabha all that I can say is that I cannot remember a single one. This sad truth came home to me most poignantly when some months ago the House of Commons debated whether Britain should intervene in the Syrian civil war. It was a debate that David Cameron’s government lost and watching it from beginning to end I remember thinking how wonderful it would be to see our own MPs win their arguments by debate instead of leaping into the well of the house.
This peculiarly Indian manner of making a parliamentary point brought the 15th Lok Sabha an especially shameful moment some weeks ago when an MP from Andhra Pradesh brought a weapon into the house for the first time ever. It may only have been pepper spray but when he tried to justify his appalling behavior he did it by saying he acted in ‘self defense’ because he was being attacked by a mob in the well of the house. When asked by Rajdeep Sardesai if he was calling his fellow MPs a mob Lagdapati Rajgopal confirmed that he was. Since this ugly incident happened in the last session of the 15th lok sabha it came to define the general drop in parliamentary standards that has occurred in the past five years.
So in writing this obituary of the 15th lok sabha I have to say, at the risk of breaking that rule about not saying bad things about the dead, that the best thing that can be said of it is thank God the 15th lok sabha is now officially dead. In the words of Oliver Cromwell, much quoted after the pepper spray incident, ‘You were deputed here by the people to get grievances redressed, are yourselves become the greatest grievance…in the name of God, go!’
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