With both Houses of Parliament adjourned sine die on Saturday, February 10, one more five-year term in the annals of India’s parliamentary democracy has come to a close. This period, 2019-24, is sadly full of dubious distinctions of which no Indian democrat can feel remotely proud.
This was least productive Lok Sabha (in terms of the lowest number of days worked) since 1952. The average annual sitting days of the first Lok Sabha, which served from 1952 to 1957, was 135 days a year, whereas the 17th Lok Sabha, which concluded this February, sat for only 55 days on average per year. The very notion of parliament as the premier forum for India’s deliberative democracy took a hard knock from this limited schedule.
In the entire session, as indeed in the previous one, no adjournment motion moved by an Opposition MP in the Lok Sabha was admitted, and not even a single notice by a member of the Opposition was accepted for discussion under Rule 267 in the Rajya Sabha. The procedures permitted by the rules to encourage debate have been unceremoniously buried under the implacable refusals of the presiding officers, who are widely assumed to be acting under instructions from the government.
A startling 35% of the bills introduced in the 17th Lok Sabha were passed after less than an hour of discussion. The Rajya Sabha was just as bad, with 34% being passed in a similar time-frame. Only 16% of all bills were referred to Standing Committees of Parliament for the kind of detailed scrutiny that allow serious opposition input and gives the government opportunity to introduce corrections before a draft Bill is cleared by the cabinet. This appalling figure of 16% represents a new low in India’s chequered Parliamentary history.
Unusually enough, during the 17th Lok Sabha, 11 out of the 15 scheduled sessions were adjourned prematurely, resulting in the cancellation of planned sittings for which members had submitted questions, notices and other submissions. This further reduced the opportunities for debate on matters other than those in which the government had a vested interest. In the last few years, it became practically impossible for MPs to introduce Private Members’ Bills into the national conversation, since so many Fridays were lost – and the “dead hours” of Friday afternoons are the only slots allocated for the introduction of Private Members’ Bills. To make matters worse, about 300 questions by Opposition MPs were deleted by the authorities as inadmissible! If Parliament is not the place where MPs can hold Ministers accountable by asking them questions, then what purpose does the institution serve in our democracy?
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the Prime Minister himself did not answer a single question on the floor of the House. The man who, on his first entry into the building upon election as PM, bowed his head to kiss the steps of what he called “the hallowed temple of democracy”, became the first leader of government to consider himself above the standards and requirements of that institution. He rarely attends and never answers even those questions directed at him; a Minister of State in the Prime Minister’s Office does that.
A unique distinction of the recently-prorogued Lok Sabha was that no Deputy Speaker was appointed for its entirety. The refusal to appoint a Deputy Speaker – who by convention is a member of the Opposition -- is a violation of article 93 of the Constitution of India. The government has shown its contempt for the Constitution by refusing to act on such a basic constitutional requirement. It may be the precursor to ignoring many other constitutional obligations in the future.
Among the other more dubious distinctions of this parliament was that it marked the first time that an MP from the ruling party was permitted to use deeply offensive communal slurs in the House without reprimand, suspension or disciplinary action. The MP, Ramesh Bidhuri, used manifestly crude and abusive language in the Lok Sabha against BSP MP Danish Ali, who promptly wrote to the Speaker and moved the Privileges Committee in December 2023. His complaint was never acted upon, even though the life of the Parliament extended to two full months beyond that incident. Ironically, in the Rajya Sabha, almost all criticisms of or statements against Prime Minister Modi and the ruling party were expunged from the record, including statements of the official Leader of the Opposition, in flagrant disregard of Parliamentary rules and democratic norms.
The winter session of 2023 also witnessed the first-ever security breach inside the Lok Sabha on December 13, when intruders wielding smoke canisters leapt from the visitors’ gallery into the chamber and had to be wrestled to the ground by courageous MPs. Not only did the government never report to Parliament about its investigation into the incident, which occurred on the 22nd anniversary of the most serious terrorist attack on the building, but 146 MPs from the Opposition were suspended for the remainder of the session for demanding a discussion about the breach.
During this Parliament, we saw the disqualification of former Congress President Rahul Gandhi for a speech outside the House that was deemed defamatory by a Gujarat court (though he was reinstated by the Supreme Court, which stayed the Gujarat conviction and sentence.) We also saw the expulsion of Trinamool MP Mahua Moitra on a recommendation by the Ethics Committee, passed over the objections of Opposition members, for sharing her parliamentary log-in credentials with an unauthorised person, a minor transgression that should not have elicited more than a slap on the wrist. If the attempt was to intimidate Opposition voices, it failed, but the warning shot across the Opposition’s bow is a worrying portent of things to come, if the ruling party returns to power.
Yes, during these five years there were a number of historic developments too, notably the move into a new parliament building and the relegation of the old to a “Samvidhan Sadan”. This was the parliament that abrogated Article 370 giving Jammu and Kashmir its special status within the Indian Union, that passed the amendment to the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act that allowed the indefinite incarceration of accused persons without bail, that passed the Citizenship Amendment Act which for the first time introduced a religious element into Indian citizenship, that criminalised triple talaq and authorised the government to intercept all communications in the country, that passed and repealed the three far-reaching farm laws, that passed the Women’s Reservation Bill and the revised criminal law statutes. But in the process of bringing about these historic changes, the Government essentially used parliament as a notice-board for its agenda and a rubber-stamp for its laws. Together with the many acts of commission and omission recorded above, it is difficult not to conclude that BJP rule has succeeded in making a mockery of India’s Parliamentary democracy.
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17.02.2024
With both Houses of Parliament adjourned sine die on Saturday, February 10, one more five-year term in the annals of India’s parliamentary democracy has come to a close. This period, 2019-24, is sadly full of dubious distinctions of which no Indian democrat can feel remotely proud.
This was least productive Lok Sabha (in terms of the lowest number of days worked) since 1952. The average annual sitting days of the first Lok Sabha, which served from 1952 to 1957, was 135 days a year, whereas the 17th Lok Sabha, which concluded this February, sat for only 55 days on average per year. The very notion of parliament as the premier forum for India’s deliberative democracy took a hard knock from this limited schedule.
In the entire session, as indeed in the previous one, no adjournment motion moved by an Opposition MP in the Lok Sabha was admitted, and not even a single notice by a member of the Opposition was accepted for discussion under Rule 267 in the Rajya Sabha. The procedures permitted by the rules to encourage debate have been unceremoniously buried under the implacable refusals of the presiding officers, who are widely assumed to be acting under instructions from the government.
A startling 35% of the bills introduced in the 17th Lok Sabha were passed after less than an hour of discussion. The Rajya Sabha was just as bad, with 34% being passed in a similar time-frame. Only 16% of all bills were referred to Standing Committees of Parliament for the kind of detailed scrutiny that allow serious opposition input and gives the government opportunity to introduce corrections before a draft Bill is cleared by the cabinet. This appalling figure of 16% represents a new low in India’s chequered Parliamentary history.
Unusually enough, during the 17th Lok Sabha, 11 out of the 15 scheduled sessions were adjourned prematurely,........
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