The dangers of breaching parliamentary propriety
Spending public-financed hours in name-calling and finger-pointing carries a big risk: It may well make the people of India indifferent to Parliament
I am not politically neutral. Far from it. I have my unequivocal political preference, and it is for the principles that define democracy, secularism, and respect constitutional morality. And, by extension, I am intuitively opposed to everything that threatens these three principles. But, in recent weeks, I have, I must admit, been appalled by the precious — and hugely expensive — time of India’s Parliament being taken up by the receiving and returning of invectives across all party lines.
When a member of Parliament (MP) or a minister rises to speak, it is as if for a duel, a combat, not a discussion. Vocal cords do not tire, nor do eardrums seek respite from the resultant explosion of sound. And the nation is treated to a relentless exchange which media then records and reports as:
‘X slams Y’
‘Y challenges Z’
‘X says he has been insulted by Y’
‘Y says X insulted him first’
‘Apologise, demands B of C’
‘Apologise? For what? For speaking the truth?, retorts C ’
‘You have no shame, says B’
‘You have no guts, says C’.
‘Yours is an autocratic mindset, says P’
‘No one could be more autocratic than Indira Gandhi, says Q’
The words ‘I am sorry’, or ‘I apologise’ do not belong in the vocabulary of parliamentary proceedings today. The Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha and the state legislatures, like our Supreme Court and high courts, are assumed to be governed by what in English may be called etiquette and in old-style Hindi and Hindustani, maryada or tehzeeb. An MP or a minister may hold strong views, believe in hard principles expressed in unqualified terms, and yet be wholly governed by maryada and tehzeeb. Employing non-malicious sarcasm, and non-personalised criticism, an MP or minister can speak trenchantly, in fact, witheringly.
Has that simple faculty slackened, or worse, has it actually been lost? What is most disturbing is the increasing personalisation in speeches. It is not possible and is certainly not required that personal references be never made, but the increasing trend of finger-pointing an individual and attacking him or her relentlessly in what seems to come from personal animosity, going into the religion, caste, parentage, educational qualifications and such intensely intimate attributes of the person, is, to put it mildly, painful to watch.
The fireworks at work in the Houses of Parliament and state legislatures are such now that when a new MP like Sudha Murthy speaks on ‘pure issues’ without wasting a syllable on a personal comment, her speech shines for the plain contrast offered by its non-toxic simplicity.
Can a situation be right when children watching live telecasts of parliamentary debates ask their parents, “Why is this uncle shouting ?” Or, “Why is that aunty screaming?” Is it wholesome and good? Surely those questions are not what MPs and MLAs are elected for, or ministers appointed to their distinguished positions.
I say this in sadness and with total respect for legislators and ministers in their individual capacities and for the Houses in their collective personalities. And, I should add, in complete political objectivity.
When MPs like Acharya Kripalani, Ram Manohar Lohia, CN Annadurai, Gayatri Devi, Renu Chakravartty, Hirendranath Mukherjee, Era Sezhiyan, Madhu Limaye, and Atal Bihari Vajpayee spoke in Parliament from the Opposition benches, they used no words that could leave a wound, a scar. When luminaries on the Treasury benches like Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Patel, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, Jagjivan Ram, Morarji Desai, Indira Gandhi, Asoka Mehta, Violet Alva, C Subramaniam spoke, they could be hard-hitting, often pulverising the Opposition, but never at the cost of the dignity of the House or in disregard of its traditions.
MPs targeted ministers, for sure, and ministers did likewise with Opposition stalwarts, but there was maryada (to use a word associated indelibly with Vajpayee) in the way they went about it, quite like when, for instance, Feroze Gandhi, a Congress MP, went with the sharp focus of a projectile for finance minister TT Krishnamachari in the Mundhra case. And when ministers like VK Krishna Menon ‘gave it back’ to Opposition MPs of the fibre of Acharya Kripalani, they did so with maximum political but zero personal punch.
It is not that earlier Houses did not have their ‘problem’ MPs. They did, but their examples, like exceptions, only proved the rule, which was that legislative opportunities are meant for enacting laws, keeping a weather eye on national affairs and, seeing that the country’s interests are never at variance from that of its states, the latter are protected against adversities and adversaries.
The politicisation and personalisation of calamities, like what has befallen Wayanad this week, is to be lamented. When calamity struck the Himalayan town of Joshimath on the night of January 2, 2023, as torrents of water gushed out of its lower slope, did the Opposition seek to make political capital out of it? If it did, that would have been as wrong.
There are urgent and important issues facing the country, such as the impact of the climate crisis on livelihood and the security of life, the ogre of zoonoses like Nipah and Chandipura hissing over us about which K Srinath Reddy wrote in these pages on August 1, an almost certain water drought looming over us, the danger of an imminent Himalayan-scale earthquake in the Himalayas of which seismologists have been warning us, and connected with this the existential issue of how the development and progress models of the last several decades need modifying in the light of experience. And urgent thought needs to be bestowed on the perils of cyber crime allied to the new phenomenon of Artificial Intelligence. Not many days ago, a Microsoft outage led to operations in several airports in India collapsing. That traumatic occurrence has been forgotten by our short-term memory storage. The phenomenon was chilling. Can such occurrences paralyse aircraft in the air, or trains on tracks on the ground? Or banking operations, leading to a national standstill? Can such an outage bring all digital-based work to a halt — either by the work of international crime or by accident?
Then, there are policy issues such as the limbo that our national Census, carried out last in 2011, is in. Another major issue is that two years from now, India’s electoral democracy will be at an existential crossroads when a delimitation of the constituencies to elect members of the Lok Sabha, following the population figures returned by the next decennial census, is to take place. The population-stabilising states of India that is Bharat, which include all the southern states, must continue to enrich our legislative and parliamentary processes as they have been doing over the decades. No democratic penalties should have to be paid by them for their high sense of demographic responsibility.
When such issues face us menacingly, spending public-financed hours in name-calling and finger-pointing carries a big risk: It may well make the people of India indifferent to Parliament. And that would be more than a thousand pities. It would be a billion-and-more disaster. Our Parliament is the altar of our democratic federal Republic, not an akhaara.
Gopalkrishna Gandhi, a former administrator, is a student of modern Indian history.The views expressed are personal