Dysfunctional Parliament in a Sad Democracy
The present sustained brawls in the Parliament has once again shown the glaring failure and snafu of our democracy. The longest constitution of the world, the Indian constitution has created three traditional organs of the state – legislature, executive and judiciary. The specific roles are assigned to every organ. However, the Parliament, in a way, is supreme because the will of the people is expressed only through Parliament and state legislatures. Our forefathers envisaged has a Parliamentary system where every issue is discussed seriously and threadbare for expressing the will of the people. The consensus on any issue results in meaningful and precise laws. Sadly today this major pillar of the democracy is in shambles.
Every democratic country has some sort of Parliament. The most unruly and violent Parliament is of South Korea. There are many other legislative bodies, mostly in Asia, Africa and Latin America which have seen many shameless scenes in the house. By and large American and West European Parliaments are working in the spirit of their written or unwritten constitutions. Even though their debates are very sharp and wily there are no physical adventures against the procedure. In UK no M P goes to the well of the house – something which is a normal practice in India.
Indian democracy stands apart from all of them because of its sheer size. Its diversity and enormity of problems require very sane and sober Parliament something which was probably there in the early period of the Republic. Today the sole motive of the opposition (including the BJP when it was in opposition) is to completely immobilise the proceedings and not allow the government to do any business which may bring laurels to it. The system has touched its nadir in the last 12 years. Late Sushma Swaraj and Arun Jaitley even went to the extent of calling the washout of the entire session as a political strategy.
The present opposition has happily kept this tradition or even gone far beyond that. There is absolutely no consensus on running the Parliament. Even when the government is ready to discuss Manipur, the opposition comes out with a caveat that the Prime Minister Modi should speak first– something which they know will not be acceptable. There was a big surprise in the last session when the ruling party itself blocked the working of the Parliament by asking for the apology of Rahul Gandhi – something unseen in the annals of Parliamentary history.
Opposition has taken the liberty to be irresponsible as they have no stakes in the Good Governance and a robust economic growth under the ruling party. On the contrary poor performance of the government will help the opposition in the next election. It seems that the problems of the people have been relegated to the background and political upmanship is firmly rooted in the system. The only hope is that the people of India with their strong common sense will rise time and again with their voting powers to tame this unethical behaviour of the political parties.
