Lokpal vote: The mystery of the missing Congress MPs

December 28, 2011 19:38 IST

Neerja Chowdhury on the various theories doing the rounds on why several Congress MPs we missing during the vote on the constitutional amendment bill.

The case of the missing 30 MPs of the ruling combine, who were not in the Lok Sabha when it voted for the Lokpal bill and the constitutional amendment bill, which would have conferred constitutional status on the Lokpal, was not only embarrassing for the Congress but it is also mystifying.

Though the Lokpal bill was passed, thanks to the walkouts by the Bahujan Samaj Party and the Samajwadi Party, bringing down the majority figure, this was not the case with the constitutional amendment bill, which got defeated.

The constitutional bill was Rahul Gandhi's [ Images ] idea pitched by him personally in order to ensure an effective watchdog which enjoys the status of the Election Commission.

Though the United Progressive Alliance [ Images ] does not enjoy a two third majority in the Lok Sabha, the defeat of the constitutional bill, having been brought before the house, was a setback for Rahul Gandhi.

The UPA has a strength of 277 in the Lok Sabha after the entry of Ajit Singh's five member Rashtriya Lok Dal, and the magic figure of the "two thirds present and voting in the House" required for the passage of the constitution bill was 288. The government not only failed to mobilise an additional 11 members, it could not even ensure the presence of all its 277 members.

Not unexpectedly this has given rise to various theories. The first is that the Congress' managers failed miserably to ensure that their entire flock was in the house when the voting took place. This despite the fact that the Congress had issued a three line whip to all its members to be present. This was also strange because MPs of the Left, Biju Janata Dal and Telegu Desam Party who had walked after the passage of the Lokpal Bill immediately came back into the house for they knew that the constitutional bill was to be taken up. Not so the missing Congress and UPA MPs. They did not come to the house. Even Dr Farooq Abdullah [ Images ], a cabinet minister, was missing.

Members of the allied parties disclosed on Wednesday that they were not pursued by the Congress managers as used to happen in the past. And that there was a casualness in evidence. It is not as if the country's grand old party does not know the art of political or parliamentary management.

In the past members have even been wheeled in on stretchers to cast their vote in important bills. Mamata Banerjee [Images ] when she was still in the Congress was once brought in a wheelchair, all wrapped up in bandages -- she had been beaten up -- to cast her vote.

Though the Congress has issued show cause notices to its errant members, the damage was done. It gave a handle to the Bharatiya Janata Party [ Images ] to go on the offensive -- that the UPA no longer had a majority in the house, and should step down.

The second theory doing the rounds is that there was a deliberate casualness on the part of those who should or could have managed things. Though Pranab Mukherjee [ Images ] met Mulayam Singh Yadav [ Images ] and leaders of the BSP before the house met on Tuesday and these parties decided subsequently to absent themselves during the vote on the Lokpal bill, facilitating its passage, the party failed to pay detailed attention to mobilising numbers on the constitutional bill.

This has raised questions whether there is an attempt by some in the party to do down Rahul Gandhi, and do nothing to smoothen his journey towards playing a larger role.

The third explanation is that the BJP let the government down. It was Sonia Gandhi [ Images ] who on Wednesday morning took the BJP to task for preventing the enactment of  a strong Lokpal by not voting for the constitutional dill, having promised to do so in the Standing Committee -- a charge rebutted by the saffron party who accused the Congress of not being able to manage its own MPs.  Sonia Gandhi was also giving a clear line to the Congress to take by way of an explanation for the setback to Rahul Gandhi's idea.

The question now arises whether the loss of face suffered by the party on Tuesday will alter its strategy in the Rajya Sabha when the Lokpal bill is taken up in the upper house on Thursday. Will it now put its best foot forward to try and get the bill passed and mobilise numbers as it would do if its survival was at stake?  

Till Tuesday the thinking amongst the party MPs was that having passed the bill in the Lok Sabha, they can now legitimately claim that they did what they could but did not have the requisite numbers in the upper house for the bill to pass muster.

Though the Congress leaders attributed the delay in taking up the bill in the Rajya Sabha to getting the President's signature as Pratibha Patil [ Images ] is in Hyderabad, the party obviously decided to defer taking up the bill so as to buy time so as to get its act together.

The Congress does not enjoy a majority in the Rajya Sabha. But the party -- and indeed the entire political class -- may acquire greater credibility if the ruling party and the main opposition party can work together, in a spirit of give and take, to ensure the passage of the Lokpal bill after 42 years. Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Arun Jaitley [ Images ] had reportedly talked about this possibility if the government agreed to accepting some further amendments in the upper house.

If this happens, the bill further amended by the Rajya Sabha would have to be cleared by the Lok Sabha again. If the government does not agree to further amendments in the Rajya Sabha, it would have the option of either referring the bill to a joint session of Parliament, or letting the bill fall.

Neerja Chowdhury

Lokpal Logjam: The pros and cons of the Jan Lokpal Bill

Srivatsa Krishna IAS

There is enormous confusion and more heat than light on the ongoing Lokpal debate. Team Anna is wrong about many things and right about many more. First, never before has India, other than the freedom struggle, seen such a strong collective action and for bringing the issue of an anti-corruption institution on to the prime-time national agenda.

The team as a whole deserves a Padma award for this alone and for deepening India's democracy. In fact, if they channelise their energy towards clean politics andelectoral reforms as a pressure group, that would be of even higher service to India.

Second, on the issue of jurisdiction, Team Anna is right in asking for original jurisdiction for Lokpal to have powers to institute suo moto investigation via the CBIinto anti-corruption cases. For such cases, CBI's superintendence, direction and control must be under the Lokpal, something that the government's Lokpal Bill, 2011, already allows under Section 25. It doesn't give powers of suo moto investigation to Lokpal, which is prudent and should be agreed to.

However, there is a rider. Right from Abhinandan Jha vs Dinesh Mishra 1968 AIR SC 117 till date, in severalSupreme Court judgements, the court has upheld Section 173 of CrPC as supreme that the investigating officer cannot be given instructions even by the Supreme Court, so forget about the Lokpal doing so.

Allowing Lokpal, under Section 20(7), the powers to close a case or file a charge sheet, is violative of the purity of investigation as enunciated by various SC judgements. What Team Anna really wants is powers of higher police officer under Section 36 of the CrPC, which the government is not willing to give.

Third, Team Anna's demand for administrative and financial independence of CBI is largely correct, for if the government doesn't give up its powers here, suspicion will always persist that through postings, promotions and annual confidential reports, the government can control the CBI. But independent must not mean unaccountable. Thus, ideally, administrative and financial control of CBI should be with a bipartisanparliamentary committee.

There are outstanding handpicked officers in the CBI but in numerous cases, irrespective of the party in power, CBI has become a handmaiden of the government. The most recent case being an outstandingly honest officer like Shyamal Ghosh suddenly finding the CBI at his doorstep more than 10 years after his retirement, only because the UPA wanted to settle scores with the NDA and an honest officer was sacrificed.

Which honest officer will ever sign another file if there is such a threat hovering over him? Also, it must be known that apart from the director, and the two special directors of CBI, all other ACRs are done in-house inside CBI, so giving control of them to Lokpal won't change that aspect at all.

Fourth, Team Anna is completely wrong in asking for powers to investigate Group C and D employees. Higher-level corruption and transactional corruption require two separate mechanisms. Assume, of the 60 lakh central government employees, if even only 20 lakh of them are corrupt and there just two complaints against half of them every year, the Lokpal would be flooded with 20 lakh complaints, which will grind its machinery to a halt.

The very process of policing every single government employee will start a new anti-corruption corruption, and be impossible to implement. Group C and D can be tackled only through strong IT systems and e-governancesuch as removing the power of discretion at cutting-edge levels, electronic audit of every keystroke in a transaction, and so on, which have almost removed corruption in land registration in some states.

Fifth, prior sanction for prosecution for IAS/IPS officers (Section 6A of DSPE Act or Section 19 of Prevention of Corruption Act) for acts done in pursuance of their official duty must remain or else, it will disincentivise the honest officer from taking decisions.

Except in a 'trap' or disproportionate assets cases, where this sanction can be done away with. Or else, almost every decision can be proved to have caused presumptive notional loss to the exchequer and proceedings under a simple complaint with the Lokpal can be started by affected parties in the corporate sector or unscrupulous rivals in the government. Section 10 of the UK Bribery Act, 2010, allows for the same permission.

Both the government and Jan Lokpal Bills have significant flaws: the latter because of inadequate understanding of the solution, though having an outstanding understanding of the problem. Both must understand the real issue is not the Lokpal but corruption, and it must not become Anna vs Parliament, and that we must come back to the heart of the debate, which is the huge public anger asking for tangible, effective action against unprecedented levels of corruption in the history of India. The cure must not become worse than the disease itself.

(The author is an IAS officer. Views are personal)

The panopticon is not a solution to corruption - sonali ranade

The Lokpal Bill (Ombudsman Bill) is being debated in the House as I write this. One is not sure if it will pass in its present form, described as lame by Anna Hazare acolytes, or in its strong form, which in my humble view would ultimately turn Indian democracy into a police state. Be that as it may, it is by now clear that team Anna has neither a clear understanding of corruption nor how the scourge can be diminished if not eradicated. Their zeal to fight corruption may be well intentioned but Anna’s preferred solution of policing corruption through a strong Lokpal is neither practical nor desirable if we are to remain a democracy. Consider.

Corruption does not occur in a vacuum. Barring the purely criminal act, corruption always occurs in an economic context and it is necessary to understand this economic context in order to minimise the scope for corruption. Consider robbery. To minimise theft it makes no sense to leave your belongings unlocked while raising a huge police force to watch over them. It is far better to insist that people take due care of their belongings and have a small police force to catch actual thieves post facto to deter others from breaking the law. So is the case for corruption. Our first order of business should be to minimise the scope for corruption. Catching violators then becomes far easier. Prevention, as they say, is better than cure. Distrust of government, the propensity to avoid taxes and to see them as unjustified extortion, concealment of wealth, preference for gold, etc, are all manifestations of defensive mechanisms against a predatory government deeply embedded in our culture for centuries. They have their roots in unstable governments, exposure to wars and invasions, and rule by alien, largely illegitimate, governments whether native, Muslim or British. Indian exposure to self-government is barely 65-years-old, a mere wink in a millennium, while practices that shape behaviour for survival take generations to change even with the right sort of education. It is naïve to expect that all the deeply ingrained attitudes changed with independence. We have come a long way but there is a long way to go too. Our easy social acceptance of corruption, and the corrupt, comes as part of our historical baggage. To be corrupt is merely being smart and not criminal. If you have any doubt on that score find out which groom of a ‘well settled’ but corrupt family was ever denied a bride for corruption. Our battle for corruption begins in this cultural milieu, which in our hypocrisy we overlook. We are corrupt partly because corruption is not a crime unless you get caught.

Corruption in India is pervasive. It is most obvious in the government and public sector because our Fabian socialism handed over large swathes of the economy to the government owing to lack of trust in private enterprise. Government babus then converted these enterprises into near monopolies and proceeded to use their assets as instruments for extracting rents from the consumers for private profit. This is the most common form of corruption. You see it in the Railways, ration shops, allocation of scarce raw materials, fertilisers, power, utilities, etc. It is best handled by breaking up monopolies, introducing fair competition through privatisation and ensuring that the demand supply gap deliberately created by the government servants to extract rents is eliminated. As the case of roaming after 3G auctions shows, the government servants are actively looking to create opportunities for rent seeking using obscure rules and ‘public good’ as an excuse. For sheer economic efficiency, public welfare and growth, this form of corruption is best tackled through economic reforms. Creating an army of cops to police everybody in these enterprises is silly, wasteful, and expensive and will not solve the basic problem of growth in demand that creates shortages. That is one reason why the so-called solution proposed by Team Anna is so silly and undesirable. Recall there used to be humongous corruption in the allocation of cars! Was the solution a police force over car manufacturers or opening up the sector to new players and competition? The case for reforms and liberalisation is so obvious that any contrary policing solution appears ludicrous. One is amazed that Team Anna was not laughed out of court.

Two other sources of corruption involve sale of resources whose ownership vests in the government, and, illegal gratification that the government servants demand in purchase of goods and services on behalf of the government. The first includes things like the sale of the spectrum and the second procurement of things like food grains, etc. Lack of transparency in processes and procedures, and adoption of intricate normative criteria in sale and purchase of goods and services are the two main reasons for such corruption. Ruthless adoption of open auctions as the only valid method in sale and purchase of services would eliminate such corruption altogether. Where the government needs to pass a certain benefit, say the small scale industry, it must find another method to give out such subsidy rather than clubbing it with non-transparent price preference. You do not need a police force to eliminate such corruption. All you need is a clear head, a stout heart and a clean conscience. Bells and whistles added on to open auctions are nothing but an invitation to corruption. They are best avoided ab initio. Lastly, there is corruption where gratification is demanded to change an administrative decision, be that to conceal crime, jump a promotion queue, seek an administrative favour, etc. This form of corruption is the kind that cannot be addressed through economic reforms and the only way to deal with it is through policing. Open, easily accessible forms of redressal mechanism and ombudsmen are required to check such corruption. It would have been great if Team Anna had decided to focus entirely on such corruption and to devise the best way to fight it. Instead, it chose to cover all sorts of things that are best addressed through economic reforms rather than policing through an omniscient police force whose cost would far exceed any potential benefit to the people.

What was surprising about Team Anna’s campaign was the skimpy homework and thought that had gone into its proposals. What was really disturbing though was the overwhelming response that the campaign gathered from India’s upwardly mobile middle class. While their rage at the series of corruption scandals was understandable, their conflation of corruption with liberalisation was naïve and dangerous. The little reforms that India has had so far have vastly reduced the scope for corruption and not added to it. If the middle class betrays such poor understanding of corruption, reforms and liberalisation, what hope for change is there for India? While corruption needs to be addressed, the more vital task is to educate and inform our middle class on reforms and their role in reducing the scope for corruption. Else we will end up putting the cart before the horse.

What a pity that the enormous political capital that Team Anna enjoyed could not be used in reducing the scope for corruption through economic reforms for want of the right ideas. When will we lay the ghost of a draconian solution to rest in our polity where an authoritarian police solution to an economic problem is the default answer?

courtesy : sonali ranade

Shall We Call The President? Shashi Tharoor

Shall We Call The President?

Pending bills, disrupted sessions, no legislation. Maybe it’s time for Parliament to go, says Shashi Tharoor

ALSO READ  ‘Infighting in BJP is the main reason for Parliament mess’ ‘We must delink MPs and MLAs from the Executive’ “Have provision for referendums on important issues” Photo Courtesy: Outlook Our parliamentary system has forced governments to concentrate less on governing than on staying in office

THE RECENT political shenanigans in New Delhi, notably the repeated paralysis of Parliament by slogan-shouting members violating (with impunity) every canon of legislative propriety, have confirmed once again what some of us have been arguing for years: that the parliamentary system we borrowed from the British has, in Indian conditions, outlived its utility. Has the time not come to raise anew the case — long consigned to the back burner — for a presidential system in India?

The basic outlines of the argument have been clear for some time: our parliamentary system has created a unique breed of legislator, largely unqualified to legislate, who has sought election only in order to wield (or influence) executive power. It has produced governments obliged to focus more on politics than on policy or performance. It has distorted the voting preferences of an electorate that knows which individuals it wants but not necessarily which policies. It has spawned parties that are shifting alliances of individual interests rather than vehicles of coherent sets of ideas. It has forced governments to concentrate less on governing than on staying in office, and obliged them to cater to the lowest common denominator of their coalitions. It is time for a change.

Let me elaborate. Every time Parliament grinds to a screaming halt, the talk is of holding, or avoiding, a new general election. But quite apart from the horrendous costs incurred each time, can we, as a country, afford to keep expecting elections to provide miraculous results when we know that they are all but certain to produce inconclusive outcomes and more coalition governments? Isn’t it time we realised the problem is with the system itself?

Pluralist democracy is India’s greatest strength, but its current manner of operation is the source of our major weaknesses. India’s many challenges require political arrangements that permit decisive action, whereas ours increasingly promote drift and indecision. We must have a system of government whose leaders can focus on governance rather than on staying in power. The parliamentary system has not merely outlived any good it could do; it was from the start unsuited to Indian conditions and is primarily responsible for many of our principal political ills.

To suggest this is political sacrilege in New Delhi. Barely any of the many politicians I have discussed this with are even willing to contemplate a change. The main reason for this is that they know how to work the present system and do not wish to alter their ways.

BUT OUR reasons for choosing the British parliamentary system are themselves embedded in history. Like the American revolutionaries of two centuries ago, Indian nationalists had fought for “the rights of Englishmen”, which they thought the replication of the Houses of Parliament would both epitomise and guarantee. When former British prime minister Clement Attlee, as a member of a British constitutional commission, suggested the US presidential system as a model to Indian leaders, he recalled, “They rejected it with great emphasis. I had the feeling that they thought I was offering them margarine instead of butter.” Many of our veteran parliamentarians — several of whom had been educated in England and watched British parliamentary traditions with admiration — revelled in their adherence to British parliamentary convention and complimented themselves on the authenticity of their ways. Indian MPs still thump their desks in approbation, rather than applauding by clapping their hands. When Bills are put to a vote, an affirmative call is still “aye”, rather than “yes”. Even our communists have embraced the system with great delight: an Anglophile Marxist MP, Hiren Mukherjee, used to assert proudly that British prime minister Anthony Eden had felt more at home during Question Hour in the Indian Parliament than in the Australian.

Speaking out of turn, shouting slogans, waving placards and marching into the well of the House are commonplace

But six decades of Independence have wrought significant change, as exposure to British practices has faded and India’s natural boisterousness has reasserted itself. Some state Assemblies in our federal system have already witnessed scenes of furniture overturned, microphones ripped out and slippers flung by unruly legislators, not to mention fisticuffs and garments torn in scuffles. While things have not yet come to such a pass in the national legislature, the code of conduct that is imparted to all newly-elected MPs — including injunctions against speaking out of turn, shouting slogans, waving placards and marching into the well of the House — is routinely honoured in the breach. Equally striking is the impunity with which lawmakers flout the rules they are elected to uphold.

There was a time when misbehaviour was firmly dealt with. Many newspaper readers of my generation (there were no cameras in Parliament then) will recall the photograph of the burly socialist MP, Raj Narain, a former wrestler, being bodily carried out of the House by four attendants for shouting out of turn and disobeying the Speaker’s orders to remain seated. But over the years, standards have been allowed to slide, with adjournments being preferred to expulsions. Last year, five MPs in the Rajya Sabha were suspended from membership for charging up to the presiding officer’s desk, wrenching his microphone and tearing up his papers — but after a few months and some muted apologies, they were quietly reinstated. Perhaps this makes sense, out of a desire to allow the Opposition its space in a system where party-line voting determines most voting outcomes, but it does little to enhance the prestige of Parliament.

Yet there is a more fundamental critique of the parliamentary system than the bad behaviour of some MPs. The parliamentary system devised in Britain — a small island nation with electorates initially of a few thousand voters per MP, and even today less than a lakh per constituency — assumes a number of conditions that simply do not exist in India. It requires the existence of clearly- defined political parties, each with a coherent set of policies and preferences that distinguish it from the next, whereas in India, a party is all too often a label of convenience a politician adopts and discards as frequently as a film star changes costumes. The principal parties, whether “national” or otherwise, are fuzzily vague about their beliefs: every party’s “ideology” is one variant or another of centrist populism, derived to a greater or lesser degree from the Nehruvian socialism of the Congress. We have 44 registered political parties recognised by the Election Commission, and a staggering 903 registered but unrecognised, from the Adarsh Lok Dal to the Womanist Party of India. But with the sole exceptions of the BJP and the communists, the existence of the serious political parties, as entities separate from the “big tent” of the Congress, is a result of electoral arithmetic or regional identities, not political conviction. (And even there, what on earth is the continuing case, after the demise of the Soviet Union and the reinvention of China, for two separate recognised communist parties and a dozen unrecognised ones?)

PRESIDENT PRECEDENTS Blasts From The Past The debate for a presidential form of government over the parliamentary form has been on for some time now • Former president R Venkataraman, as minister in the Tamil Nadu government, had sent a draft resolution to the AICC in 1965 recommending constituting a committee to examine an executive directly elected by the people for a fixed term. • In 1967, the India International Centre conducted a colloquium on the subject with contributions from British peer Max Beloff, among others. During the next few years JRD Tata, GD Birla, Justice KS Hegde and former CJI BP Sinha advocated a fixed executive. • The first paper advocating a presidential form was prepared by AR Antulay in 1975 during the Emergency, which met with resistance from Jayaprakash Narayan. Indira Gandhi said it was “an inspired document circulated by mischievous people to create a scare”. • Jayaprakash Narayan opposed it saying “temptation would be too great for a president, if he were strong, to usurp people’s rights”. The socialist and communist parties consistently opposed a presidential system. • The Swaran Singh Committee report submitted in 1976 looked into the issue and declared the parliamentary system “best suited” for the country because it “ensures greater responsiveness to voice of the people”. Antulay and Vasant Sathe, members of the committee framing the report, argued vigorously to the contrary. SOURCE: Granville Austin’s Working a Democratic Constitution - The Indian Experience

THE LACK of ideological coherence in India is in stark contrast to the UK. With few exceptions, India’s parties all profess their faith in the same set of rhetorical clichés, notably socialism, secularism, a mixed economy and non-alignment, terms they are all equally loath to define. No wonder the communists, when they served in the United Front governments and when they supported the first UPA, had no difficulty signing the Common Minimum Programme articulated by their “bourgeois” allies. The BJP used to be thought of as an exception, but in its attempts to broaden its base of support (and in its apparent conviction that the role of an Opposition is to oppose everything the government does, even policies it used to advocate itself ), it sounds — and behaves — more or less like the other parties, except on the emotive issue of national identity.

So our parties are not ideologically coherent, take few distinct positions and do not base themselves on political principles. As organisational entities, therefore, they are dispensable, and are indeed cheerfully dispensed with (or split/reformed/merged/dissolved) at the convenience of politicians. The sight of a leading figure from a major party leaving it to join another or start his own — which would send shock waves through the political system in other parliamentary democracies — is commonplace, even banal, in our country. (One prominent UP politician, if memory serves, has switched parties nine times in the past couple of decades, but his voters have been more consistent, voting for him, not the label he was sporting.) In the absence of a real party system, the voter chooses not between parties but between individuals, usually on the basis of their caste, their public image or other personal qualities. But since the individual is elected in order to be part of a majority that will form the government, party affiliations matter. So voters are told that if they want an Indira Gandhi as prime minister, or even an MGR or NTR as their chief minister, they must vote for someone else in order to indirectly accomplish that result. It is a perversity only the British could have devised: to vote for a legislature not to legislate but in order to form the executive.

Photo: EC Archives What our present system has not done as well as other democratic systems might, is ensure effective performance

So much for theory. But the result of the profusion of small parties is that today we have a coalition government of a dozen parties, some with just a handful of MPs, and our Parliament has not seen a single-party majority since Rajiv Gandhi lost his in 1989. And, as we have just seen in the debacle over FDI in retail, and as also happened three years ago on the Indo-US nuclear deal, dissension by a coalition partner or supporting party can hamstring the government. Under the current system, India’s democracy is condemned to be run by the lowest common denominator — hardly a recipe for decisive action.

The disrepute into which the political process has fallen in India, and the widespread cynicism about the motives of our politicians, can be traced directly to the workings of the parliamentary system. Holding the executive hostage to the agendas of a range of motley partners is nothing but a recipe for governmental instability. And instability is precisely what India, with its critical economic and social challenges, cannot afford.

The fact that the principal reason for entering Parliament is to attain governmental office creates four specific problems. First, it limits executive posts to those who are electable rather than to those who are able. The prime minister cannot appoint a Cabinet of his choice; he has to cater to the wishes of the political leaders of several parties. (Yes, he can bring some members in through the Rajya Sabha, but our Upper House too has been largely the preserve of fulltime politicians, so the talent pool has not been significantly widened.)

Second, it puts a premium on defections and horsetrading. The Anti-Defection Act of 1985 was necessary because in many states (and, after 1979, at the Centre) parliamentary floor-crossing had become a popular pastime, with lakhs of rupees, and many ministerial posts, changing hands. That cannot happen now without attracting disqualification, so the bargaining has shifted to the allegiance of whole parties rather than individuals. Given the present national mood, I shudder to think of what will happen if the next election produces a Parliament of 30-odd parties jostling to see which permutation of their numbers will get them the best rewards.

Photo: AFP We need strong executives not only at the Centre and in the states, but also at local levels, like towns and panchayats

THIRD, LEGISLATION suffers. Most laws are drafted by the executive — in practice by the bureaucracy — and parliamentary input into their formulation and passage is minimal, with very many Bills passing after barely five minutes of debate. The ruling coalition inevitably issues a whip to its members in order to ensure unimpeded passage of a Bill, and since defiance of a whip itself attracts disqualification, MPs loyally vote as their party directs. The parliamentary system does not permit the existence of a legislature distinct from the executive, applying its collective mind freely to the nation’s laws.

Fourth, for those parties that do not get into government and realise that the outcome of most votes is a foregone conclusion, Parliament itself serves not as a solemn deliberative body, but as a theatre for the demonstration of their power to disrupt. The well of the House — supposed to be sacrosanct — becomes a stage for the members of the Opposition to crowd and jostle, waving placards and chanting slogans until the Speaker, after several futile attempts to restore order, adjourns in despair. In India’s Parliament, many Opposition members feel that the best way to show the strength of their feelings is to disrupt the lawmaking rather than debate the law. Last year, an entire session was lost to such daily disruptions; this year’s winter session has seen two weeks of daily adjournments, many in the presence of bemused visiting members of other countries’ legislatures.

Apologists for the present system say in its defence that it has served to keep the country together and given every Indian a stake in the nation’s political destiny. But that is what democracy has done, not the parliamentary system. Any form of genuine democracy would do that — and ensuring popular participation and accountability between elections is vitally necessary. But what our present system has not done as well as other democratic systems might, is ensure effective performance.

The case for a presidential system of either the French or the American style has, in my view, never been clearer.

The French version, by combining presidential rule with a parliamentary government headed by a prime minister, is superficially more attractive, since it resembles our own system, except for reversing the balance of power between the president and the council of ministers. This is what the Sri Lankans opted for when they jettisoned the British model. But, given India’s fragmented party system, the prospects for parliamentary chaos distracting the elected president are considerable. An American or Latin American model, with a president serving both as head of state and head of government, might better evade the problems we have experienced with political factionalism. Either approach would separate the legislative functions from the executive, and most important, free the executive from dependence on the legislature for its survival.

A LEGISLATIVE YEAR LOST Lok Sabha Bills introduced Session Planned hours Actual sitting Time lost (%) Plan Performance Winter 2010 144 8 90% 32 9 Budget 2011 138 117 18% 34 9 Monsoon 2011 156 104 33% 34 13 Rajya Sabha Session Planned hours Actual sitting Time lost (%) Plan Performance Winter 2010 120 3 89% 31 0 Budget 2011 115 80 17% 33 3 Monsoon 2011 130 81 41% 37 10 SOURCE: Session 1-4: Statistical Handbook; 2010 Session 5-7: Resume of work; Session 8: Statement of work, Lok Sabha, Resume of work Rajya Sabha NOTE: Time of sitting of Lok Sabha has been taken as 11 am to 6 pm. Time of sitting of Rajya Sabha has been taken as 11 am to 5 pm. Parliament often compensates for lost time by sitting overtime. The above data does not take this into account. Financial and Appropriation Bills are not included. (prepared by PRS Legislative)

A directly-elected chief executive in New Delhi, instead of being vulnerable to the shifting sands of coalition-support politics, would have stability of tenure free from legislative whim, be able to appoint a Cabinet of talents, and above all, be able to devote his or her energies to governance, and not just to government. The Indian voter will be able to vote directly for the individual he or she wants to be ruled by, and the president will truly be able to claim to speak for a majority of Indians rather than a majority of MPs. At the end of a fixed period of time — let us say the same five years we currently accord to our Lok Sabha — the public would be able to judge the individual on performance in improving the lives of Indians, rather than on political skill at keeping a government in office. It is a compelling case.

Why, then, do the arguments for a presidential system get such short shrift from our political class?

Photo: AFP We have a coalition of a dozen parties. Our Parliament has not seen single-party majority since Rajiv Gandhi lost his in 1989

At the most basic level, our parliamentarians’ fondness for the parliamentary system rests on familiarity: this is the system they know. They are comfortable with it, they know how to make it work for themselves, they have polished the skills required to triumph in it. Most non-politicians in India would see this as a disqualification, rather than as a recommendation for a decaying status quo.

The more serious argument advanced by liberal democrats is that the presidential system carries with it the risk of dictatorship. They conjure up the image of an imperious president, immune to parliamentary defeat and impervious to public opinion, ruling the country by fiat. Of course, it does not help that, during the Emergency, some around Indira Gandhi contemplated abandoning the parliamentary system for a modified form of Gaullism, thereby discrediting the idea of presidential government in many democratic Indian eyes. But the Emergency is itself the best answer to such fears: it demonstrated that even a parliamentary system can be distorted to permit autocratic rule. Dictatorship is not the result of a particular type of governmental system.

In any case, to offset the temptation for a national president to become all-powerful, and to give real substance to the decentralisation essential for a country of India’s size, an executive chief minister or governor should also be directly elected in each of the states, most of which suffer from precisely the same maladies I have identified in our national system. The case for such a system in the states is even stronger than in the Centre. Those who reject a presidential system on the grounds that it might lead to dictatorship may be assured that the powers of the president would thus be balanced by those of the directly-elected chief executives in the states.

I would go farther: we need strong executives not only at the Centre and in the states, but also at the local levels. Even a communist autocracy like China empowers its local authorities with genuine decentralised powers: if a businessman agrees on setting up a factory with a town mayor, everything (from the required permissions to land, water, sanitation, security and financial or tax incentives) follows automatically, whereas in India, a mayor is little more than a glorified committee chairman, with little power and minimal resources. To give effect to meaningful self-government, we need directly elected mayors, panchayat presidents and zilla presidents, each with real authority and financial resources to deliver results in their own geographical areas.

INTELLECTUAL DEFENDERS of the present system feel that it does remarkably well in reflecting the heterogeneity of the Indian people and “bringing them along” on the journey of national development, which a presidential system might not. But even a president would have to work with an elected legislature, which — given the logic of electoral arithmetic and the pluralist reality of India — is bound to be a home for our country’s heterogeneity. Any president worth his (democratic) salt would name a Cabinet reflecting the diversity of our nation: as Bill Clinton said in his own country, “My Cabinet must look like America.” The risk that some sort of monolithic uniformity would follow the adoption of a presidential system is not a serious one.

Democracy, as I have argued in my many books, is vital for India’s survival: our chronic pluralism is a basic element of what we are. Yes, democracy is an end in itself, and we are right to be proud of it. But few Indians are proud of the kind of politics our democracy has inflicted upon us. With the needs and challenges of one-sixth of humanity before our leaders, we must have a democracy that delivers progress to our people. Changing to a presidential system is the best way of ensuring a democracy that works.

Is that the most important thing for India, some ask. BR Ambedkar had argued in the Constituent Assembly that the framers of the Constitution felt the parliamentary system placed “responsibility” over “stability” while the presidential did the opposite; he did not refer to “accountability” and “performance” as the two choices, but the idea is the same. [See box for Ambedkar’s remarks.] Are efficiency and performance the most important yardsticks for judging our system, when the inefficiencies of our present system have arguably helped keep India united, “muddling through” as the “functioning anarchy” in Galbraith’s famous phrase? To me, yes: after six-and-a-half decades of freedom, we can take our democracy and our unity largely for granted. It is time to focus on delivering results for our people.

Some ask what would happen to issues of performance if a president and a legislature were elected from opposite and antagonistic parties: would that not impede efficiency? Yes, it might, as Barack Obama has discovered. But in the era of coalitions that we have entered, the chances of any party other than the president’s receiving an overwhelming majority in the House — and being able to block the president’s plans — are minimal indeed. If such a situation does arise, it would test the mettle of the leadership of the day, but what’s wrong with that?

Parliamentary Over Presidential BR Ambedkar’s remarks in the Constituent Assembly on why we chose the parliamentary system Photo: Getty Images THE PRESIDENTIAL system of America is based upon the separation of the executive and the legislature. So that the president and his secretaries cannot be members of the Congress. The Draft Constitution does not recognise this doctrine. The ministers under the Indian Union are MPs. Only MPs can become ministers. Ministers have the same rights as other members of Parliament, namely, that they can sit in Parliament, take part in debates and vote in its proceedings. Both systems of government are, of course, democratic and the choice between the two is not very easy. A democratic executive must satisfy two conditions: 1. It must be a stable executive, and 2. It must be a responsible executive Unfortunately, it has not been possible so far to devise a system which can ensure both in equal degree. You can have a system which can give you more stability but less responsibility or you can have a system, which gives you more responsibility but less stability. The American and the Swiss systems give more stability but less responsibility. The British system, on the other hand, gives you more responsibility but less stability. The reason for this is obvious. The American executive is a non-parliamentary executive, which means that it is not dependent for its existence upon a majority in the Congress, while the British system is a parliamentary executive, which means that it is dependent upon a majority in Parliament. Being a non-parliamentary executive, the Congress of the United States cannot dismiss the executive. A parliamentary government must resign the moment it loses the confidence of a majority of the members of Parliament. Looking at it from the point of view of responsibility, a non-parliamentary executive being independent of Parliament tends to be less responsible to the legislature, while a parliamentary executive being more dependent upon a majority in Parliament become more responsible. The parliamentary system differs from a non-parliamentary system in as much as the former is more responsible than the latter but they also differ as to the time and agency for assessment of their responsibility. Under the non-parliamentary system, such as the one that exists in USA, the assessment of the responsibility of the executive is periodic. It is done by the electorate. In England, where the parliamentary system prevails, the assessment of responsibility of the executive is both daily and periodic. The daily assessment is done by members of Parliament, through questions, resolutions, no-confidence motions, adjournment motions and debates on addresses. Periodic assessment is done by the electorate at the time of the election, which may take place every five years or earlier. The daily assessment of responsibility that is not available under the American system is it is felt far more effective than the periodic assessment and far more necessary in a country like India. The draft Constitution in recommending the parliamentary system of executive has preferred more responsibility to more stability.”

What precisely would the mechanisms be for popularly electing a president, and how would they avoid the distortions that our Westminster-style parliamentary system has bequeathed us?

In my view, the virtue of a system of directly-elected chief executives at all levels would be the straightforward lines of division between the legislative and executive branches of government. The electoral process to get there may not initially be all that simple. When it comes to choosing a president, however, we have to accept that elections in our country will remain a messy affair: it will be a long while before Indian politics arranges itself into the conveniently tidy two-party system of the US. Given the fragmented nature of our party system, it is the French electoral model I would turn to.

Under parliamentary system, we are defined by narrowness. A presidential set-up will renew demand for an India for Indians

As in France, therefore, we would need two rounds of voting. In the first, every self-proclaimed netaji, with or without strong party backing, would enter the lists. (In order to have a manageable number of candidates, we would have to insist that their nomination papers be signed by at least 10 parliamentarians, or 20 members of a state Assembly, or better still, both.) If, by some miracle, one candidate manages to win 50 percent of the vote (plus one), he or she is elected in the first round; but that is a far-fetched possibility, given that even Indira Gandhi, at the height of her popularity, never won more than 47 percent of the national vote for the Congress. More plausibly, no one would win in the first round; the two highest vote-getters would then face each other in round two, a couple of weeks later. The defeated aspirants will throw their support to one or the other survivor; Indian politicians being what they are, there will be some hard bargaining and the exchange of promises and compromises; but in the end, a president will emerge who truly has received the support of a majority of the country’s electorate.

Does such a system not automatically favour candidates from the more populous states? Is there any chance that someone from Manipur or Lakshadweep will ever win the votes of a majority of the country’s voters? Could a Muslim or a Dalit be elected president? These are fair questions, but the answer surely is that their chances would be no better, and no worse, than they are under our present system. Seven of India’s first 11 prime ministers, after all, came from Uttar Pradesh, which surely has no monopoly on political wisdom; perhaps a similar proportion of our directly-elected presidents will be from UP as well. How does it matter? Most democratic systems tend to favour majorities; it is no accident that every president of the United States from 1789 to 2008 was a white male Christian (and all bar one a Protestant), or that only one Welshman has been prime minister of Great Britain. But then Obama came along, proving that majorities can identify themselves with the right representative even of a visible minority.

Photo: AFP Democracies favour majorities; every US president from 1789 to 2008 was a white Christian. But then Obama came along

I dare say that the need to appeal to the rest of the country will oblige a would-be president from UP to reach across the boundaries of region, language, caste and religion, whereas in our present parliamentary system, a politician elected in his constituency on the basis of precisely such parochial appeals can jockey his way to the prime ministership. A directly-elected president will, by definition, have to be far more of a national figure than a prime minister who owes his position to a handful of political kingmakers in a coalition card-deal. I would also borrow from the US the idea of an Electoral College, to ensure that our less populous states are not ignored by candidates: the winner would also be required to carry a majority of states, so that crushing numbers in the cow belt alone would not be enough.

And why should the Indian electorate prove less enlightened than others around the world? Jamaica, which is 97 percent black, has elected a white Prime Minister (Edward Seaga). In Kenya, President Daniel arap Moi hailed from a tribe that makes up just 11 percent of the population. In Argentina, a voting population overweeningly proud of its European origins twice elected a son of Syrian immigrants, Carlos Saul Menem; the same phenomenon occurred in Peru, where former president Alberto Fujimori’s ethnicity (Japanese) covers less than one percent of the population. The right minority candidate, in other words, can command a majority; to choose the presidential system is not necessarily to make future Narasimha Raos or Manmohan Singhs impossible. Indeed, the voters of Guyana, a country that is 50 percent Indian and 47 percent black, elected as president a white American Jewish woman, who happened to be the widow of the nationalist hero Cheddi Jagan. A story with a certain ring of plausibility in India...

The adoption of a presidential system will send our politicians scurrying back to the drawing boards. Politicians of all faiths across India have sought to mobilise voters by appealing to narrow identities; by seeking votes in the name of religion, caste and region, they have urged voters to define themselves on these lines. Under our parliamentary system, we are more and more defined by our narrow particulars, and it has become more important to be a Muslim, a Bodo or a Yadav than to be an Indian. Our politics has created a discourse in which the clamour goes up for Assam for the Assamese, Jharkhand for the Jharkhandis, Maharashtra for the Maharashtrians. A presidential system will oblige candidates to renew the demand for an India for the Indians.

Any politician with aspirations to rule India as president will have to win the people’s support beyond his or her home turf; he or she will have to reach out to other groups, other interests, other minorities. And since the directly-elected president will not have coalition partners to blame for any inaction, a presidential term will have to be justified in terms of results, and accountability will be direct and personal. In that may lie the presidential system’s ultimate vindication.

Though the author is a Congress MP, the views expressed in this article are
strictly personal© Copyright Shashi Tharoor, 2011