India’s functioning anarchy

NEW DELHI—Every year, during India’s rainy season, there is, equally predictably, a “monsoon session” of Parliament. And, every year, there seems to be increasing debate about which is stormier—the weather or the legislature.

Consider the current session, which began on Aug. 1. The opening day was adjourned, in keeping with traditional practice, to mourn the death between sessions of a sitting member of parliament. But the adjournment did not come before a routine courtesy greeting to the visiting speaker of Sri Lanka’s parliament was interrupted by Tamil MPs from a regional party, who rose to their feet to shout demands for his expulsion because of his government’s behavior towards that country’s Tamil minority. The errant MPs were rapidly silenced, and the visitor received a table-thumping welcome from the rest of the House.

Matters were not so swiftly resolved, however, the next day. No sooner had a newly-elected member taken his oath than a number of MPs from the Bahujan Samaj Party, which rules India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh, stormed into the well of the House, shouting slogans and waving placards in protest against the government’s land-acquisition policies.

The speaker attempted for a few minutes to get them to return to their seats, then gave up and adjourned the session for an hour. When the MPs reassembled, the opposition members, now joined by MPs from a rival regional party, marched towards the speaker’s desk, making even more noise. After a few more ineffectual minutes of trying to be heard above the din, the speaker adjourned Parliament again. One more attempt was made before the House adjourned for the day, with no item of legislative business transacted.

That, unfortunately, is often par for the course in India’s Parliament, many of whose opposition members appear to believe that disrupting proceedings, rather than delivering a convincing argument, is the most effective way to make their points. Last winter, an entire five-week session was lost without a single day’s work, because the opposition parties united to stall the House, forcing adjournments every day. There has not been a single session in recent years in which at least some days were not lost to deliberate disruption.

It wasn’t always this way. Indian politicians were initially proud of the Westminster-style parliamentary system that they adopted upon independence. India’s nationalists were determined to enjoy the democracy that their colonial rulers had denied them, and convinced themselves that the British system was best. When a future British prime minister, Clement Attlee, traveled to India as part of a constitutional commission and argued the merits of a presidential system over a parliamentary one, his Indian interlocutors reacted with horror. “It was as if,” Attlee recalled, “I had offered them margarine instead of butter.”

Many of India’s new MPs, several of whom had been educated in England and observed British parliamentary traditions with admiration, reveled in the authenticity of their ways. Indian MPs still thump their desks, rather than clap their hands, in approbation. When bills are put to a vote, an affirmative call is still “aye,” rather than “yes.”

But six decades of independence have wrought significant change, as exposure to British practices has faded and India’s natural boisterousness has reasserted itself. Some of the state assemblies in India’s federal system have already witnessed scenes of furniture upended, microphones ripped out, and slippers flung by unruly legislators, not to mention fist fights and garments torn in scuffles.

While things have not yet gone so far in the national legislature, the code of conduct that is imparted to all newly-elected MPs—including injunctions against speaking out of turn, shouting slogans, waving placards, and marching into the well of the House—is routinely honored in the breach. Equally striking is the impunity with which lawmakers flout the rules that they are sworn to uphold.

There was a time when misbehavior was dealt with firmly. One of my abiding recollections from childhood was the photograph of a burly Socialist parliamentarian, Raj Narain, a former wrestler, being bodily carried out of the House by four sergeants-at-arms for shouting out of turn and disobeying the speaker’s orders to return to his seat.

But, over the years, standards have been allowed to slide, with adjournments being preferred to expulsions. Last year, five MPs in the upper house of Parliament were suspended for charging up to the presiding officer’s desk, wrenching his microphone and tearing up his papers. But, after a few months and some muted apologies, they were quietly reinstated.

Perhaps this makes sense, for it allows the opposition some space in a system in which party-line voting determines most legislative outcomes. Four decades ago, in more genteel times, an opposition legislator once ended a debate whose outcome was a foregone conclusion, with the words, “We have the arguments. You have the votes.” Years later, the same MP, Atal Behari Vajpayee, became prime minister, and took pride in giving the opposition as much leeway as possible.

The result is a curiously Indian institution, whose prevailing standards of behavior would not be tolerated in most parliamentary systems. In India’s Parliament, many members feel that the best way to show the strength of their feelings is to disrupt the lawmaking rather than debate the law. John Kenneth Galbraith, who served under President Kennedy as US ambassador to India, described the country as a “functioning anarchy.” We need look no further than the temple of Indian democracy to see it in action. Project Syndicate

Shashi Tharoor, a former Indian minister of state for external affairs and UN undersecretary general, is a member of India’s parliament and the author of a dozen books.