3 min readNew DelhiDec 21, 2023 05:59 AM IST
First published on: Dec 21, 2023 at 05:59 AM IST
Former Union Law Minister Ashwani Kumar Thursday termed the expulsion of 143 MPs from Parliament as the “biggest example of arbitrary exercise of power in democracy”.
At the launch of his book A Democracy in Retreat: Revisiting the Ends of Power, Kumar said: “You can hide behind rules and power of an institution, but democracy is based on benign exercise of power”.
“What legitimises power is the manner in which it is exercised,” he said and added that accountability to the “spirit of Constitution” is important in a democracy.
Kumar said that while the Opposition has a right in a democracy to oppose, it “also cannot claim moral superiority and intellectual superiority in its judgement on all cases”.
He said it was wrong for the Opposition to condemn the government on some issues during the pandemic. “It is wrong for the opposition to pick holes here and there in the foreign policy… when it comes to weighty issues of national security and foreign policy, you have to defer to the judgement of the government of the day.”
Rajya Sabha MP Manoj Jha, who was present at the launch, said: “I have no qualms in saying that while we critique the government and rightly so, most of us are not able to hold a mirror to ourselves.”
“What have we done? I for one, I believe my role as a Member of Parliament is not (to) make a permanent route to the well of the House. There are other instruments available. So, the very conversation between government and opposition is a conversation based on animosity, based on enmity. Look at the language they employ and off late, of late… we also employ the same language. So ultimately the sufferer is not individual members of a ruling party or individual members of opposition, the sufferer is the very edifice called Indian Parliament, the idea of democracy,” said Jha, who is among the 143 suspended MPs.
He said that democracy, as B R Ambedkar said, remains a top dressing in India and its deepening has not taken place.
Kumar also spoke on the Supreme Court. “My problem with the court is that it does not enforce its own lofty edicts.”
“The truth is some of its judgments are very disappointing. For example, you virtually rewrite the constitution in the election commissioner’s case. I don’t agree with that judgement at all. It amounts to virtually rewriting the Constitution against the will of Parliament and brings it in conflict with another great institution of democracy. After all we can’t forget, whatever the aberrations may be, but Parliament as representative of the will of the people is the supreme democratic institution. I am not saying that Parliament can’t go wrong or Parliamentarians can’t go wrong. ..For that matter, judges are also not infallible.”
Former Vice President M Hamid Ansari and Justice Madan B Lokur also spoke on the occasion.
Ansari, citing reports, said authoritarianism is ascending across the world.
“Over the last six years, the number of countries moving towards authoritarianism have doubled. Nearly half of 173 countries assessed were experiencing decline in at least one metric of democracy,” he said.
At the launch of his book A Democracy in Retreat: Revisiting the Ends of Power, Kumar said: “You can hide behind rules and power of an institution, but democracy is based on benign exercise of power”.
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