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.

It is worth reconsidering this act, primarily for two reasons. One, it keeps our legislative proceedings starkly superficial. For a political party there is nothing as invigorating as questioning by back-benchers. The extraordinary power given to party high commands by the anti-defection law blunts any questions that may be posed by well-meaning legislators. Two, even if a party leadership decides on a course of action, it is unsustainably undemocratic to force a legislator to stick by the whip’s command. A rationale for the law is that it tackles horse-trading, but surely a mature Parliament can find ways to deal with corruption.

Because look what the law deprives us of. It prevents the formation of a strong middle ground by governments who can never be sure that they’ll have enough votes to force through their agenda. And given that every vote becomes a show of strength on party lines, the law is an impediment to reforms that would allow private-member bills to gain viability and give Parliament meaningful scrutiny of international agreements and high-level appointments.