The failure of the Bush administration to have their $700 billion bailout plan for Wall Street passed by the House of Representatives has predictably extended the gloom in stock markets globally. Equally spectacularly, it was President George W. Bush’s Republican Party that failed to deliver enough votes to carry the plan through. Sixty per cent of the Democrats in the House voted yes, and it was somewhat amusing to see the Republicans complain that the Democrats did not deliver enough more votes to make up for a break in their own ranks. The bailout plan is bound to be up for a revote, but the political nuances that have been allowed utterance in the procedure are illustrative of the kind of political reform needed in

India to inculcate a more responsible, and responsive, politics.

Every Representative under strong pressure from the administration was equally conscious of his voters’ scrutiny of his voting record. Contrast this with what prevails in the Indian system, and rewind to the last major vote in our Parliament, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s trust motion in the context of political divisions on the Indo-US nuclear deal. It was an open secret that the opposition had any number of MPs in Lok Sabha convinced that the deal was in India’s interest. And, conversely, there are bound to have been unconvinced MPs on the treasury benches. But the brutally repressive Anti-Defection Act disallows any freedom to an individual MP to cast her vote against the party whip. The penalty for voting according to one’s conscience — in the archaic vocabulary of our parliamentary discourse — is expulsion from the House. Even in Britain, whose procedures so greatly inform India’s parliamentary system, disregard for a three-line whip only gains expulsion from the political party, not from Parliament.

... contd.