Opinion The House we lost

But as elected representatives ready themselves to face voters in the general election, there was a faint hope that it would sign off on a more sober note with MPs allowing a semblance of the normal routine to return. But that was not the way of this House, and the prime minister should be guided by his sadness for democracy to lead a discussion on how it came to pass that the 15th Lok Sabha will be a case study for how not to run the House.

Both the government and opposition need to take stock of how deeply they are complicit in making a travesty of parliamentary democracy. They will find that it was no coincidence that political argument and mobilisation on law-making, Parliament’s primary task, seemed to be found more outside its chambers — in the street and beyond the participation of law-makers — in the course of this Lok Sabha. The sanctity of parliamentary proceedings, the even-tempered reverence for its conventions of conversing across the aisles that once guided treasury and opposition benches alike, stood decidedly violated these past five years.

If there was an impatience with the deliberative process of Parliament as an essential filter to update India’s laws — seen in the Anna Hazare-led protests to unilaterally dictate an anti-corruption law to Parliament — it derived in great measure from the paralysis afflicting law-making, from the Congress-led government and BJP-led opposition’s failure to pull together for institutional fidelity to the legislature.

Today, if Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal makes a mockery of the legislative assembly by demanding a session in a public space, the line of responsibility for undermining the legislature runs all the way to those who so casually disregarded their duty to holding their ground in Parliament House. If there is a notion that winning an election allows the incumbent government to cite the vote to do as it pleases, and scrap the courtesies of give-and-take between the Delhi government and the Centre, that assertion of brute majority was repeatedly made by an ungenerous UPA 2 too — most recently in failing to confer with the leader of the opposition on an appointment to the Lokpal panel.

This Lok Sabha will be brutally interrogated by history. Can its unrepentant members at least begin to come to grips with its failings?