Everybody profits

After the high drama of adjourning Parliament sine die, after Sonia Gandhi’s Renunciation II was played out before the media, the UPA government has plumbed for the laziest option of all. After due consultations with other parties, it has chosen to expand the list of offices that will be exempt under the Parliament (Prevention of Disqualification) Act, 1959. Only Section 3 of the Act is to be amended to accommodate this new lot of offices, including the chairpersonship of the National Advisory Council. This is the ultimate please-all solution. Everybody profits and therefore nobody will demur. There will be no walk-outs in Parliament on this one. That’s for sure.

The least that could have been attempted is a definition of what constitutes an office of profit in contemporary India. After all, as these columns have pointed out, there are innumerable contradictions in the exercise of this law. If the idea is to protect the lines of separation between the legislative and the executive wings of government, then why do we have an initiative like MPLADs, which hands over executive powers to legislators? If the idea is to ensure that the process of law-making is not sullied by extraneous interests, why are those occupying offices of profit outside of government, in the private sphere, not equally liable under the law? The various court judgments on the issue have only served to make the issue more complex. Only last week the Supreme Court, while dismissing Jaya Bachchan’s petition challenging her disqualification as MP, observed that what is material is not whether the person holding an office of profit received any remuneration or pecuniary gain, but whether the office is itself of profit. Other judgments have used pecuniary gain as a factor for consideration.

Making sense of all this would demand an application of mind that clearly eludes the UPA government. This is a pity of course, because it means that the resolution of this issue — which had almost caused a constitutional crisis not so long ago — has only been postponed. The minister of parliamentary affairs seems to have read Dale Carnegie, who once pronounced that “the successful man will profit from his mistakes and try again in a different way”. But while MPs may profit from this outcome, the same cannot be said for the country.