A talking shop

A talking shop

The Opposition-sponsored resolution seeking a probe by a joint parliamentary committee on the Bharat Aluminium Company (Balco) deal was defeated with only 119 MPs in favour of the motion while 239 MPs voted against. The Opposition members, who started the debate with a lot of sound and fury, ended up with egg on their face. Evidently, they had not done their homework. While allegations of graft without even a shred of evidence were freely made against the government by some irresponsible Opposition members, when it was time to vote quite a number of them were not even present in the House. The Sharad Pawar-led NCP is a case in point: none of its MPs was present during the voting. While the Opposition clearly failed to impress, the disinvestment minister Arun Shourie, assisted by his predecessor Arun Jaitley, appeared more persuasive. Such avoidable dramas reduce Parliament to what Lenin once described it as: "a mere talking shop."

Arguably, by talking and debating on public issues, parliaments end up fulfilling a crucial role in democracy: that of the watch dog. The public debates bring about transparency. Given exhaustive media coverage of parliamentary debates, such deliberations disseminate policy information to the public. Granted that in a parliamentary form of government the executive is ultimately responsible to the legislature. Yet, is it necessary for Parliament to vote on every executive decision? Once its approval has been taken in principle, as in the case of disinvestment, isn't a parliamentary vote on each and every modality of the issue merely superfluous?

The question arises from two considerations: First, given the strict party alignments on almost every issue in Parliament, voting merely displays the tyranny of brute majority. Given the tradition of whips, a government with a majority can and does pull through on most issues of the day. Cross-voting on various issues is a tradition practiced in presidential systems as in the United States Congress. Cross-voting in parliamentary systems would lead to the collapse of the government of the day on the floor of the House, since it would be interpreted as a vote of no confidence. The outcome of voting, therefore, is almost a foregone conclusion in parliamentary systems. Second, given the number of bills to be passed by Parliament and the low frequency with which it meets, voting on one issue can cause enormous delays. This leads invariably to the process of `guillotine' on the last day, when several bills are clubbed together and voted without any debate on the subjects. Given these two limitations, parliamentsare much better off debating the issues than voting on every executive decision. Voting on every issue, pre-fixed on party lines, simply erodes the seriousness of the outcome. Granted that executive usurpation of power since the days of Indira Gandhi has transformed the parliamentary form into what can be described without any exaggeration as a prime ministerial form of government. But it is up to the legislature to pick up the gauntlet. If unruly scenes of street politics continue to be practised within the august chamber, Parliament would end up abdicating its most important responsibility: that of acting as an institutional check on untrammelled executive power.