Knock, knock, is anybody there?

All this has only reinforced the feeling among people that politicians of all hues, whether of the BJP brand or the Congress variety, are not only corrupt, they do not want to work as well.

In a huge, diverse and poor country like India, it is not all that unusual for every session of Parliament to be hit by some calamity, crisis or scandal. But does that mean that Parliament should not function? Whatever little business that gets transacted is done amidst din, without any debate — which is actually what Parliament is all about.

For almost five years now, parliamentarians have been engaged in an exercise of evolving a code of conduct for themselves. This happened during P.A. Sangma’s tenure as the Lok Sabha Speaker, and it was an impressive long list of do’s and don’ts. In fact, Sangma had called a special session of Parliament in 1997, the 50th year of India’s independence, to debate the issues of parliamentary functioning and MPs’ behaviour. And so enthusiastic were the members, that the two-day session had to be extended to accommodate all the MPs who wanted to speak.

Then, G.M.C. Balayogi, just before his tragic death in a plane crash, covered the same ground all over again. But all the resolves of the MPs have just been sound and fury. Within days of making them, the MPs have rushed into the well of the House, shouted and stalled the proceedings. This only goes to devalue the parliamentary functioning.

Journalists who have been covering Parliament for the last couple of decades recall how, in the ’80s, ministers used to be on tenterhooks the day before their questions were due to be asked in the House. The ministry officials would brief them for a couple of hours on that day. All appointments on that day as well as the next morning would be avoided.

Today, the ministers get no butterflies in their stomachs. Many a time, they even depute somebody else to answer the questions on their behalf. No minister is afraid of Question Hour. Nor, for that matter, do MPs ask the searching questions they used to be the norm in the past. Earlier, the MPs used to be in the know when an important question was listed and would be prepared for the supplementaries that could follow. Today a minister is hardly ever cornered.

The story of call attention motions, which are a serious part of parliamentary debate, is no different. As far as legislations go, they hardly evoke any interest among the MPs. The annual number of days for which the Houses sit in session has also dwindled. In the ’80s, it used to be around 130-140 days per year. Today, it averages just 80-90 days, although there are countries — and Germany is one of them — where Parliament is in session for almost the whole year.

The villain of the piece, according to many MPs, is Zero Hour. There is no mention of Zero Hour in the rule books and it, according to Shivraj Patil, was a gift of the Lohia era. According to Patil, when he had once discussed with George Fernandes the need to dispense zero hour, the latter had reacted quite sharply, saying, ‘‘how can you stop it? We started it.’’

Till ten years ago, Zero Hour would last around 15 to 20 minutes, during which MPs made their point sharply. Today, the rumpus just goes on and on, and it is Zero Hour which makes the headlines of the next day.

Politicians blame the media for reporting mainly what is disruptive and happens during Zero Hour, while there is not a word about the serious debates for which MPs — there are still a handful of them who are as good as any who strode the Indian Parliament in the past — may have prepared for days.

Patil, who was the Speaker of the Lok Sabha from 1990-95 and is a seven-time MP who has never lost an election, delineates the last 55 years in three phases. In the initial stages, soon after independence, the emphasis was on law-making and institution-building, then it shifted to the enforcement of the laws. It was much later that it shifted to holding the government accountable, during which period scams were regularly highlighted and disturbances became the order of the day.

The dominance of ‘power’ as an ideology, the emphasis on ‘pragmatism’, the non-seriousness about issues, the distance that has grown between politicians and the people, the rise of regionalism which has thrown up smaller parties, who, in turn, have become important players in a coalition government — all these are responsible for the decline of parliamentary functioning. Members of regional parties are often playing to their constituencies back home, not a national audience. Ultimately, and this may be a cliche, Parliament reflects the reality outside.

The decline of Parliament is not a new phenomenon. While the decimation of institutions was pronounced in the Indira Gandhi era, parliamentary functioning has deteriorated since 1998.

Today, the Opposition have failed to expose Vajpayee’s ministers, half of whom cannot even face Question Hour. The Government has managed to last because the Opposition parties are working at cross purposes, whatever be their rhetoric. On the petrol pump issue, the Congress, instead of telling the government to pull out lists and punish the guilty, instead of debating the issue and evolving an alternative system of allotment, chose the easier way out by disrupting the two Houses. Finally, adjourning the Houses sine die suited everyone.

As the party which ruled India for 45 years and got used to power, the Congress no longer has the moral fibre to raise issues that a responsible Opposition is supposed to. And being in power, the BJP is bound to find something against the Congress on every issue on which it gets cornered, using this to beat the Congress with. This is precisely what happened in the petrol pump case.

The tragedy is that the BJP and its allies, which have traditionally been in the Opposition and at the receiving end of an unresponsive Congress in power, behave no differently today.