Unruly MPs endangering Indian democracy
The daily disruption of the legislative business of Parliament by unruly and ill-behaved members has to stop. A collective madness seems to have seized the peoples’ representatives in the Lok Sabha and even the Rajya Sabha or Council of States in which 12 members are nominated by the President of India for great contributions to literature, science, art and social service. And it is bringing Indian democracy into grave disrepute. The root of the problem preventing orderly business in Parliament which is mandated to formulate and enact laws — after due deliberation and debate — to govern the country, is that unforeseen events outside in the great hinterland beyond New Delhi intrude upon the daily agendas of the two houses of the people. Although there is provision in the procedural rules of the two houses to call attention of the representatives of the people to matters of grave national importance, MPs become so agitated about raising these issues that they want the procedural rules to be suspended. Thus in recent times the Nithari child murders, the Left Front government’s alleged atrocities against small farmers in Singur and Nandigram, and even the site of a proposed maritime institute have prompted MPs to disrupt proceedings of Parliament demanding immediate debate and government response.
But while occasional interruption of the business of Parliament can be attributed to the righteous indignation of members over atrocities and injustices in some part of the country, the large number of hours lost to attending to the business of enacting legislation indicates that MPs are not really aware of their role as legislators, or they are uninterested in discharging them. For instance in the latest budget session of Parliament, the ordinary business of the Lok Sabha could be conducted for only 46 of the scheduled 100 days because of the speaker having to resort to frequent adjournments and suspension of the house to allow tempers to cool.
Although honourable MPs unable to control their tempers and passions may be unaware, such loss of time in attending to the primary business of Parliament extracts a heavy price from the public by way of a plethora of ill-conceived and ill-drafted legislation which is enacted into law without adequate examination and debate. Cursory examination and debate in Parliament enables wily bureaucrats who draft laws to avail the opportunity to invest themselves with vast discretionary powers — a defining characteristic of Indian legislation — which is a root cause of widespread corruption.
The bottom line is that members of Parliament from among whom ministers of government are drawn, have an obligation to respect the rules of orderly conduct and decorum in Parliament. Every hour of time lost in Parliament where overheads are high, costs the people Rs.1.38 lakh. This if not wider considerations of growing public disillusionment with the democratic system of government, should prompt them to mend their ways in the national interest.
Restore fundamental right to property
The urge to own a patch of earth of one’s own to build a home is one of the most fundamental necessities in the hierarchy of needs of all human beings. Yet there seems to be a national conspiracy to ignore its importance. Three decades ago in 1976, during the dark night of India’s first and only period of Emergency rule decreed by then prime minister Indira Gandhi, a rump Parliament unanimously passed the 42nd Amendment to the Constitution which abolished citizens’ fundamental right to own and dispose property. Since then over a dozen parties and coalitions have been voted to power in New Delhi, but not one of them has thought it fit to restore this stolen fundamental right of all citizens. Therefore the law as it stands is that the Central or state governments can expropriate the land or property of any citizen by paying an ‘amount’ rather than fair market price ‘compensation’ as decreed by the Supreme Court in the Bank Nationalisation Case (1969).
Traditionally, Left ideologues and politicians have opposed restitution of the fundamental right to property into the Constitution on the ground that it is a right valued only by a rich minority. But ironically the right of the State to expropriate private property in Singur and Nandigram is being violently opposed by poor farmers in West Bengal which has been ruled by a Left Front government headed by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) for almost three decades. If the right to own and dispose property was still a fundamental right, the state government would not have dared to forcibly acquire the property of these small farmers except with their consent. The status quo ante would have required Tata Motors and the Indonesia-based Salim Group (for whose use the West Bengal government is acquiring farm land), to directly negotiate prices and terms of transfer and pay agitating farmers several multiples of market price to persuade them to sell.
Regrettably, disrespect for the property rights of citizens — especially of the poor — is ubiquitous in contemporary India still suffering an anti-property Soviet-style mindset. Across the country millions of poor and illiterate farmers are in effect denied their right to property through the simple expedient of withholding documents which make up title deeds; by restricting their right to sell their property to highest bidders and by way of denying them rural infrastructure which diminishes the right to enjoy their property. Moreover by artificially restricting land supply, the ubiquitous politician-bureaucrat conspiracy has driven up urban properties sky-high.
Land and property markets need to be freed from government interference so that the abundant land resources of this huge subcontinent flow into the market to the benefit of farmers and to depress the unconscionably high housing and property prices in urban India. But the prerequisite of this socially beneficial outcome is acknowledgement of the fundamental right of all citizens to own and dispose property with unfettered freedom. The restoration of the fundamental right to property will restrict state intervention in property markets, and balance the land supply-demand equilibrium to bring property prices within the reach of the vast majority of India’s ill-served citizens.