Perks and pinpricks

NOTHING so unites our chattering classes as indignation over Members of Parliament voting themselves fat salary increases for doing little more than walking out on their work. The great Indian public remembers it has a Parliament mostly when they see their representatives pouring into the well, shouting and screaming and generally making a shameful spectacle of themselves. Last week’s announcement of the Cabinet having cleared an additional Rs 28 crore to keep MPs in daal-roti was preceded by a series of reports on how the benches of both Houses remain innocent of most of their Members through most of the day, especially when the most important business of the nation is under discussion. This newspaper’s correspondent has included me among the ‘diligent’ few who is to be seen in the precincts, but I have to confess that I am there when what is on involves me or interests me. Otherwise, bunking it is for me too the order of the day.

As an insider, however, I am a bit surprised that the reader (and the correspondent) seem to think the first duty of an MP is to lounge around the chamber all day long listening to others orating. We are there when whipped into doing so, which is usually for a vote. For the rest, there is a great deal else that your common or garden MP is required by his calling to do. There are, first of all, the parliamentary committees where much of the work of parliament is transacted. I am on the consultative committee for water resources, primarily because Karnataka will not release Cauvery waters when required to my con- stituents in the delta. Then I am in the standing committee on urban and rural development, checking on the ratio of government bombast to work on the ground (about 1000:1). I am also co-convenor of the group set up by the committee to examine the progress in implementing the constitutional amendments on Panchayati Raj. When not tied up with that, I have to present myself to the committee on public undertakings, where I am trying to get all concerned to focus on a memorandum submitted by SCOPE, the standing conference of public enterprises, which gives the lie to the conventional wisdom that public sector undertakings are dens of iniquity and inefficiency while the private sector is home to angels and archangels. That over, there is the joint select committee on the Patents Bill, charged with the modest task of seeing how to save our public health and food security systems from the depredations of the WTO’s TRIPS agreement. And as they say, last but not least, I am also on the joint parliamentary committee on the stock market scam which has already generated about a tonne of paper on who has been ripping off whom and for how much. A garage is needed
by MPs, less to park their cars than their paper.

None of this, however, is in the public realm. Parliamentary committees are required to function in camera. More’s the pity, because opening up committee proceedings to the media and the masses, as is the practice in the United States, remains, I am persuaded, the only way of saving what little remains of the unravelled shreds of public respect for the workings of our democracy.

Perhaps, though, in advocating media coverage for committee meetings I am being over-optimistic. Newspapers are not gazettes. They are in the business of reporting what is ‘‘newsworthy’’. And the basis of all news is the disruption of order. Which is why an MP making a speech is like a dog biting a man: lucky if he gets an also-mentioned. If he really wants to get a box-item on page one, all he has to do is something outrageous. I know. I make speeches, researching them for hours and burning wagons full of midnight oil, boiling down vast quantities of data to the 20 minutes the stern chair will allow me, give or take another five minutes for obstreperous interruptions from the treasury benches. Nothing, or almost nothing, of that ever finds itself into newsprint. But I only have to do the least thing outrageous — man biting dog — and reporters reach for their notepads: ‘‘The irrepressible Congress MP, Mani Shankar Aiyar, was at it again today...’’

Television has not helped much. While it gives MPs an opportunity to get in their two bits on their own (without some callow reporter dripping adjectives to add ‘‘colour’’ to his story), the soundbite is down to a few seconds. So the shallower you are and the more able to sacrifice truth at the altar of an aphorism, the brighter your chances are of being asked again. The public thus gets through TV an enhanced mug-shot of the MP but hardly the opportunity to look into his head.

The discrediting of our democracy is greatly aided by parliamentary reporters jostling each other to get a better view from the gallery whenever there is disruption, in stark contrast to the virtually empty press gallery, exactly reflecting the virtually empty chamber, when any subject of genuine national interest comes up for debate. So MPs, recognising that there are no votes in serious business, slip out to meet constituents, answer their mail, collar recalcitrant ministers, chase laggard bureaucrats, spring innocents from police thanas, mediate disputes over which culvert, which bus-stand, which community hall, which burial shed, is to be funded where out of the much-derided MP Local Area Development Scheme, and a myriad other non-newsworthy things that never make the headlines. If I want to make headlines, I have only to taunt Uma Bharati with
‘‘Ek dhakka aur do’’ or provoke a treasury bench MP to yell, ‘‘Amar Singh’’ to make it to the rich text box-item on page one or at least
the gossip column of parliam- entary news.

I earned myself editorials for asking a Washington correspondent whether he wanted to dance with Nancy Reagan. But bet your bottom paisa no editor heard or cared that in the last three weeks alone I have unburdened myself in the House, as the Congress party’s one-down batsman, on the Agra Summit, the NSCN cease-fire agreement, President’s Rule in Manipur, UTI, the saffronisation of education, non-implementation of the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act, and full statehood for Pondicherry. I have even raised a Question of Privilege against the home minister.

But all this is for my personal and private pleasure. From the deep wells of bitter experience, I know — and am resigned to — the public, which resents my voting myself a salary rise, never getting to hear what I do to earn myself a second idli for breakfast.

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