STRUCTUREEven in the decades that immediately followed the adoption of the Constitution, there was keen argument whether the structure that had been adopted was the most appropriate for the country. You will recall that in 1959, JP put forth his well-known ‘Plea for the Reconstruction of the Indian Polity’. A few years later, Mr B K Nehru argued for wholesale changes in his Rajaji Memorial Lecture. Later, Mr L P Singh urged an altogether different system of representation, with multiple-member constituencies in place of the single-member constituencies we have. These were persons of the highest commitment to freedom. They were patriots of the first water. They were persons of vast experience. Who can doubt their motives? But since then discourse has got so vitiated that to even suggest that we re-examine the structure is to lay oneself open to the charge that one has some ‘hidden agenda’. That is how the one great opportunity that was created—the establishment of the Constitution Review Commission under Justice Venkatachaliah—was as good as killed even before it could commence work. That effort was killed. But the system is not working. Therefore, we must recommence the debate on alternatives. The place to start is the problem to which Dr Rajendra Prasad had drawn attention, the qualifications persons must fulfill before they aspire to enter legislatures. The cases that have occasioned the disquiet over ‘‘tainted ministers’’ are the more conspicuous instances of the consequences Dr Prasad apprehended. Both aspects are important: the lacunae which allow nefarious persons to become legislators—you have just had a vivid example in Maharashtra that would rival any in Bihar—as well as the circumstance that compels even an honest Prime Minister to induct them. In these cases, the defence has been that the persons concerned have not been convicted, and that, like everyone else (except, of course, those whom we dislike for other reasons!) they are innocent till they are convicted. But under this system, we provide the greatest incentive to the one who has wreaked evil and who happens to be a legislator or aims at becoming a legislator to stretch the judicial process out for ever. Suppose you had the opposite provision: that once the court frames the charges, a person, howsoever honest and innocent, shall immediately demit office, and that he will not be qualified to stand for office till acquittal. He would then have the opposite incentive: his interest would be best served by assisting the courts so as to ensure the speediest conclusion to the judicial process. ‘But anyone can get any charge framed against anyone in politics these days,’ say politicians, specially those from Bihar. The best way to induce them to work to remedy this situation is to inflict consequences of it on them which they would find unacceptable! That is, disqualify them till they are acquitted. They would then join others in bringing about a situation in which investigating agencies and courts are not suborned by the one in office. Many aspects of the present arrangements are indeed ludicrous. Consider Section 8(A) of the Representation of People’s Act. It says that a sitting member of Parliament or an Assembly who gets convicted of, say, murder, shall be disqualified unless he files an appeal within three months of the conviction. Which fool will fail to file an appeal within three months? And then ensure that the case keeps getting adjourned for ever? Why not have the opposite provision? That the person will be disqualified but that the appeal shall be heard day to day without any adjournment, and be concluded within three months? Consider the larger question of sending persons to legislatures who have the aptitude and ability to weigh legislative proposals, to reflect on policy alternatives. The fact is: it just is not possible for a Palkhivala to win an election to Parliament today. One of the considerations that persuaded Mr L P Singh to argue for multi-member constituencies was that they would help parties field a better type in elections. Were we to have a list system extending over the entire country, voters would just not know the merits of individual candidates: India is a continent; a person may have done exemplary work in Maharashtra and yet be unknown in Assam. But if we clubbed five neighbouring constituencies, and required each party to field a list of five candidates for the enlarged constituency, it is possible that the party would be able to induct two or three persons on to the list who were equipped for legislative and executive work. That was the reasoning. Mr B K Nehru, on the other hand, argued in effect for a full presidential system. He was greatly concerned with both consequences, the poor quality of persons who this ‘parliamentary system’—I put the words within inverted commas because what we have made of the system bears little resemblance to what a parliamentary system is supposed to be—was throwing up, as well as the divisive pulls that it was triggering. A list system or its variant, Mr Nehru felt, would give an even greater boost to caste parties. You will only get lists of rival castes, young man, he admonished me when I broached the proposal with him. On the other hand, were we to require that the head of the Executive shall be chosen directly through a nation-wide election, we would ensure that no one who appealed to just a section of the population would get elected. Simultaneously, were we to give him the freedom to select members of his Cabinet from outside the legislature also, we could give ourselves a better chance of placing our governments in hands of persons qualified to run them. Those two are not the only elements, of course, in such proposals: after all, unless the institutions that are meant to ensure accountability—the CAG, the Lok Ayuktas and Lok Pal etc—are simultaneously made effective, a presidential system can result in Government passing into the hands of a total rogue and he being completely liberated from even the minimal oversight that today’s unruly legislatures secure. So direct elections and recruiting colleagues from outside the legislature are not the only elements in the alternative we should consider. Moreover, there are many gradations: in the US, members of the Cabinet are neither members of nor do they participate in deliberations of the legislature—though the questioning they are subjected to in appearances before Committees of the Senate and the House of Representatives is far more exacting than the one that ministers in our system have to face. We could have an intermediate arrangement: that the Prime Minister could select persons from within or from outside the legislature for his Cabinet; that, once appointed, they would no longer be able to vote in the legislature but would participate in debates so as to convey to the legislature the reasons that have prompted the Executive to decide things one way rather than another. The point thus is not that there is an alternative system readymade that will attend to all our difficulties. The point is that we must face the fact that the present system is not providing the sorts of legislatures and executives that would enable us to meet the challenges we face, and that, therefore, we must explore alternatives. There are several other proposals that have been advanced from time to time. Each of these should be examined threadbare: a) A salutary improvement was instituted by the NDA government: that the size of the ministry shall not be larger than 15 per cent of the Lower House. But in several states the ceiling has been circumvented by the predictable dodge: persons who could not be retained as ministers have been allowed to retain what they really value—all the perquisites of ministership—by being made heads of public sector corporations. Surely, this sort of a dodge can be nipped. b) The way legislatures are fractured today gives persons a huge incentive to form two-member parties than be parts of a larger party—this is the way to maximise chances of becoming a minister. A thoughtful observer put the alternative to me the other day: why not provide that a party with less than 5 per cent of the legislature must become part of one alliance or another, and, more important, none of its members must be taken in as minister? c) Compulsory voting will make manipulation of the electorate that much more difficult. d) During every election central forces are sent to states ostensibly to ensure that the poll is fair. But as the theory is that they are there only to assist state forces, state governments just ensure that the central forces remain in the school compounds in which they are camped. Everyone knows that this is the case. Yet the farce is kept up. Why not place them under the direct charge of the Election Commission? e) The anti-defection law in its present form, the Tenth Schedule of the Constitution, completely stifles the freedom of individual legislators—for it provides that, whatever the matter, a member who votes against the directions of his party shall be guilty of anti-party activity and thus be liable to expulsion from the legislature. Why not restrict its application to votes of confidence or no-confidence? Why not also jettison the anachronistic convention of one-rupee cut-motions leading to fall of the government, and provide that a government can be brought down only by a no-confidence motion? Discussion on subjects like the Budget would then be more candid, decisions on them would be taken with some elbow room. f) And on the no-confidence motion itself, why not adopt the German provision—that the motion cannot be one expressing no-confidence in the Prime Minister; that it can only be one expressing confidence in some other person as Prime Minister? That way the haggling that we have had to witness after a government was voted out would be prevented. RULES AND INSTITUTIONS Of course, there is no structure that cannot be perverted. Exasperated at the way our country was being kept from attaining its potential by socialist controls and policies, Mr Palkhivala used to say that it requires real genius to keep India down, but that our governments have it. We have the same order of genius to put every institution, to twist every law to our personal and immediate advantage. I still remember a vivid lesson I learnt when I first went to the US to work for a doctorate. In those days, for just a hundred dollars, one could buy a ticket and travel anywhere in the US on a Greyhound bus for several months. I decided to use the first vacation to go from Syracuse to Seattle to San Francisco to San Jose, a complete circle. At the last minute a Professor told me that he was driving across to his home in Seattle and I was welcome to ride in his car. It was a sports car. We were racing across the mid-western states. You couldn’t see anyone for miles and miles. The Professor drove at unnerving speed. But every now and then he would slow down, come to a complete stop, and then take off again. At last I asked him why he was doing that. ‘‘But there was a ‘Stop’ sign there,’’ he explained. Here we were on a vast plateau with no one around for miles. But just because there was a sign, he would bring the car to a complete stop.In our case, the status of a person is known by the number of rules he can disregard. That is a major reason why ministers and legislators figure so high on the status ladder! But sturdy banks enable water to flow faster. Indeed, can there be a river without banks? Rules enlarge my freedom as they bind others to limits that they cannot cross. Indeed, a collection of people is a community in as much as its members obey a common set of rules, in as much as they abide by a common set of values. For our structures to function, we have to instill this habit, of rule abidingness—in our legislators as much as in our children. Look at what happens in Parliament. At its 50th anniversary, MPs unanimously pledged to abide by a Code of Conduct. The Code prescribes, to take just one instance, that no one shall step into the well of the House, and anyone who does so shall be automatically suspended. Is that rule observed? Is it enforced? Does any MP fear that it will be enforced? We have, of course, to devise ways and conventions by which appropriate persons are appointed to institutions. And I do think that what has been done this time round—where Secretaries and others have been moved around on the charge that ‘X’ is ‘Y’s’ man, etc, has infected the Central Secretariat with the very virus that has already ruined many a state administration. But placing the best persons in jobs is only the first step. Institutions are strengthened or destroyed by the way they function every day in ordinary cases. Just as in our dusty summers we bathe twice a day, we need to nurture institutions twice a day. Throughout the day. Every day. As long as we live. Nor is there a switch which, once it is turned on, will ensure that the institution shall function well thereafter, there is no alteration in the structure that will ensure that it will subserve the general good forever thereafter. Heed the Dhammapada. What it counsels us as individuals is also exactly how institutions are to be tended: ‘‘As the silversmith removes impurities from silver, so the wise man from himself: one by one, little by little, again and again.’’ ‘‘Again and again’’—the key words. A MYTH, AND A MISTAKEN NOTION ‘‘But proposals such as the one you mentioned—direct election of the head of Government; multi-member constituencies—strike at a fundamental feature of our system. The MP represents his constituents. Who will look after their interests in the sorts of alternatives you are talking about?’’ That an MP does, or even can look after the interests of 18 lakh people—the average number in a Lok Sabha constituency—is just a myth. By clutching this myth we divert our effort from the two things that we should really be striving to ensure. No Prime Minister can solve the problems of a billion people; no MP can solve the problems of 18 lakh people by attending to them one by one. The only way either can help is to work to create a system of administration, and to help have those policies adopted that will alleviate their problems. By retaining this myth—‘‘The MP is to solve the problems of persons in his constituency’’—we send the wrong kind to legislatures, the one who has the guile to promise ever-more; once he is there, we force him to expend his energy on the wrong things; we even help him rationalise the wrong he may do—he can explain away his efforts to get a road construction contract to a relative or a financier by showing that he is just helping persons from his constituency. In India today being a representative of the people has gone beyond the premise that the person’s task is to wrest special benefits for them. It is taken to mean that he is a ‘representative’ in that he is like the people he represents. Look at the behaviour of, and the ‘‘qualifications’’ of many ‘‘a man of the masses’’ who people our legislatures. Yet a person deserves to be elected not because he is ‘‘like the people’’—as little literate as they are, as unaware of the world as they are, as little able to weigh legislative proposals as they are. He is to be elected because he is best equipped to weigh which among competing proposals and options is best for them. And not for them in particular, but for the country as a whole. To be continued The writer is BJP MP and former disinvestment minister PART I PART II PART IV
