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Journalism of Courage
Inside many a Member of Parliament there is a friendly genie waiting to dispense favours, big and small. In the you-scratch-my-back-I8217;ll-scratch-yours ambience of Indraprastha, a gift of a gas cylinder or a telephone connection can go a long way in enhancing personal clout and profile.
It is not, therefore, entirely surprising that some Lok Sabha MPs are now clamouring to get back the privilege they had once enjoyed of dispensing 25 telephone and 100 LPG connections every year.
Those who now argue for the reinstatement of the privilege do so on two grounds. One, that it provides them with the means to 8220;serve people8221; and, two, that it is just not right that while they, who are elected by the people, don8217;t enjoy this privilege, their counterparts in the Upper House who don8217;t have to face the electorate, continue to dispense telephone and gas connections. To take the first argument, it8217;s difficult to see how the allotment of 25 telephone links in a year, or 100 gas connections for that matter, translates into social service for an entireLok Sabha constituency. Ultimately, no quota will be sufficient to cater to the demand for such facilities and it will, inevitably, amount to encouraging selective patronage. The fact that Rajya Sabha MPs, who are not elected on the popular vote, continue to have this privilege while the Lok Sabha MPs do not is, of course, patently unfair. But, surely, depriving the former group of their discretionary quotas rather than reinstating them for the latter group is the better way to correct this anomaly. There are some who argue that this tangle over a few gas and telephone connections is a trivial matter and should not be cause for unwarranted sermonising. But they forget that every discretionary gas or telephone connection is a throwback to an era when governance was synonymous with political patronage. It8217;s time that this country moves on from the quota raj of yore.
