House training

In recent years it has become fashionable to insist that while democracy is slowing down in the West, it is quickening in India. There is truth to that claim. Political mobilisations were completed in Western societies some decades ago, and politics has become a contest of ideas, whose range is narrowly defined. An overriding challenge in these democracies is to keep alive the ordinary citizen8217;s interest in a game whose sameness has become a bit of a bore. In India, on the other hand, newer social constituencies are being mobilised and new coalitions are still being forged. In the last elections in Bihar, for instance, the EBC Extremely Backward Caste became the new political acronym to make acquaintance with; and Mayawati8217;s spectacular success in UP last year announced the making of a brand new social coalition. Yet, there is a sense in which democratic institutions in India are unable to keep up with 8212; and make sense of 8212; the riveting politics on the ground. Vice President Hamid Ansari puts his finger on the problem when he talks of the need to restore the deliberative role of our legislatures.

In a talk to the 14th All India Whips8217; Conference in Mumbai, he has called for a review of their day-to-day functioning. His concern is an urgent one. Most of the big political issues have bypassed Parliament in recent years; and the abdication of states assemblies on this count is far greater. More number of sittings and a tighter discipline on the floor of the House are needed, of course, and the vice president is right to point out that the average number of sittings in our country is less than that in several Western democracies and that even in India, it has been declining. If Parliament functions and is seen to function more, the voter may well become attentive to the representative8217;s performance in Parliament, and the representative may just begin to see parliamentary performance as constitutive of the task of representation.

But for Parliament to truly revive, we need to collectively think about the reasons for its decline. Was it just the all-round waning of idealism? Or is it that we need to reorient the ways in which we look at institutions 8212; to pay attention to their inner lives, and not see them as black boxes? Let8217;s debate this one 8212; in Parliament.