The Indian Parliament’s “monsoon” session ended Friday after repeated disturbances, with little to show for its 19-day stretch in the way of bills passed or legislation debated.
The Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, the principal opposition to the Congress-led government, repeatedly interrupted the session’s proceedings to protest the allocation of India’s coal resources, leading to debate about whether disruption is a legitimate parliamentary tool. But on Friday, the opposition defended its actions.
“Disruption can sometimes produce results that discussion cannot,” Arun Jaitley, a senior BJP leader, said at a news conference. The BJP had to resort to this extreme tactic, he said, because the Congress-led government “is a regime which is committed to kleptocracy.”
Congress party leaders, for their part, called the BJP’s tactics obstructionist and undemocratic.
“This is a negation of democracy,” said Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in a televised address outside Parliament. “If this thought process is allowed to gather momentum, that will be a grave violation of the norms of parliamentary politics as we have understood it.”
With Parliament effectively shutdown, several important pieces of legislation were left unattended and will not be addressed at earliest until Parliament reconvenes in the winter. In particular, lawmakers had been expected to pass legislation to reform India’s woefully outdated policies on acquiring land for industrial, urban and other projects. Other issues expected to be addressed included reservations for government jobs, anti-money laundering measures and protecting whistle-blowers.
The Lok Sabha, or lower house, worked a total of 25 hours in this session of Parliament, or 20 percent of the scheduled time, according to numbers crunched by the New Delhi-based PRS Legislative Research. Much of that time was spent shouting and sloganeering, the research group said.
The Rajya Sabha, or upper house, was marginally more productive, clocking 27 hours, or 27 percent of the time the members had originally set out for work.
Now that Parliament’s session has ended, opposition lawmakers said they would expand their protest in the coal case. They met in the courtyard of the main Parliament building, holding placards and shouting slogans, on Friday afternoon.
“Now our agitation for corruption-free India will go from Parliament to street,” L. K. Advani, a senior leader of the BJP, told journalists.
Parliament spends $1.6 million a day to operate, Minister of Parliamentary Affairs Pawan Kumar Bansal said at a news conference at the end of the session. During the last session, ministers planned to introduce 32 bills and pass at least 15, he said. Instead, four were passed.
“This session will be known for work not done,” said Mohammad Hamid Ansari, the chairman of the upper house. Of nearly 400 “starred questions,” or those for which lawmakers expect an oral answer from the relevant minister, only 11 were answered. “Question Hour,” when legislators discuss issues of the day, happened only once in the 19 days.
Commentators say Parliament has become a platform for politics, not lawmaking. “A counter-parliamentary culture has developed in this country,” said Subhash Kashyap, who was a researcher in the country’s first Lok Sabha and went on to be the house’s secretary general. When the Congress party is in the opposition, he said, its members disrupt Parliament, and when they are in power, they “lecture others on discipline and good conduct.” The BJP “does exactly the same,” he added.
One of the primary reasons for this state of affairs, Mr. Kashyap said, is that the current government doesn’t enjoy a substantial majority in Parliament. Making matters worse, he said, are the numerous scandals that have chipped away at its “moral authority.”
A few decades ago, Mr. Kashyap recalled, disruptions were an aberration. “They have now become the rule,” he said. He recalled an incident in 1989 when 63 members of Parliament were suspended for a week for not allowing Parliament to function smoothly.
“There has been an overall slowdown in the legislative process,” said Devika Malik, an analyst at PRS Legislative Research. The fallout of all these disruptions, Ms. Malik pointed out, is that not only is Parliament passing fewer bills, but it is also spending less time discussing those bills.
The current Lok Sabha, which Ms. Malik said is on a path to becoming the least productive in the country’s history, has passed an average of 40 bills a year since its members were elected in 2009. By comparison, the first Lok Sabha passed an average of 72 bills each year.
One in five bills passed since 2009 has been discussed for less than five minutes. The four bills passed in this “monsoon” session were voted on amid chaos and shouting.
0 comments:
Post a Comment