Legislators must represent constituents and conscience, not party bosses

Indian democracy can either be grass-roots-representative or politically stable, but not both. The reason is that the individual legislator is legally powerless in front of the party “high command”. All decisions of party leaders are just rubber-stamped by Parliament. Any dissent, and the legislator is threatened with removal, writes Harsh Gupta in The Mint.

Indian democracy has a unique problem: Its government can either be grass-roots-representative or politically stable, but not both. The reason is that the individual legislator is legally powerless in front of the party “high command”, making the executive unaccountable. And if regional parties rise to increase accountability, stability suffers. One of the biggest culprits is the anti-defection law.

After winning a huge majority in the 1984 general election, Rajiv Gandhi passed the 52nd amendment to the Constitution in 1985. This made legislators liable to be suspended if they did not always vote according to their party whip—unless one-third of a party’s bench defected and formed a new party. This was done ostensibly to prevent them from opportunistically changing parties. Since this still did not prevent wholesale defections, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government outlawed this entirely through the 91st amendment in 2003.

So if there is any reform which a majority of the Opposition and a small but significant minority of the ruling party support, it still cannot go through despite having an overall majority in the House. For instance, many members of both the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) and the NDA were sympathetic to insurance reform during the previous government’s tenure—but the party bosses were undecided.

Therefore, the executive is neither checked nor pushed by the legislature once the government is formed—defeating the concept of separation of powers. All decisions of party leaders are just rubber-stamped by Parliament. Any dissent, and the legislator is threatened with removal—that is, his entire constituency might go unrepresented.

The executive is not checked by the legislature, defeating the concept of separation of powers

Yet the British parliamentary system, on which Indian democracy is explicitly modelled, allows intra-party dissent. Tony Blair took the support of some Tories for the Iraq war, over opposition from his own party members. The American system has even had legislature controlled by a different party than the executive, besides many intra-party differences—“green” Republicans and “gun” Democrats are not hard to find.

In India, too, there were open debates within the Congress during Jawaharlal Nehru’s time, on issues such as Hindu personal law and land reforms. But party power soon became concentrated: Dissenting party leaders left the Congress, eventually leading to a proliferation of regional parties. Anti-defection laws only strengthened this trend after the 52nd amendment: Instead of one or two legislators leaving, an entire army would defect.

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Some argue that dissent on policy votes, but not party defection, should be legal. It sounds reasonable, but what if a deeply unpopular prime minister cannot be voted out by his own party members, thanks to anti-defection provisions, yet is not able to pass any law because of now legalized dissent? Moreover, there is nothing undemocratic if legislators change party affiliation mid-way—they may simply be representing a changing grass-roots reality. Nonetheless, even a law that bans only defection, but not dissent, would still be a huge improvement over the status quo—and it is the need of the hour.

At the end of the day, allowing legislators to speak for themselves adds the right checks to our parliamentary democracy. These checks may slow decisions, but they also prevent many rash decisions and back-room dealings. The legislator must be allowed to represent his constituents and conscience, not his party bosses.

Read the full article here.

Congress needs to nurture Rahul: Not goad him on when he is unprepared

I believe that the Congress is loading Rahul Gandhi with some really unrealistic expectations. To be fair, there is nothing terribly wrong with Rahul Gandhi. But he is simply not capable of working out a new paradigm for the party or for Indian politics at large, writes Madhu Kishwar in DNA.

Rahul’s no Obama...at least not yet
I believe that the Congress is loading Rahul Gandhi with some really unrealistic expectations. If you expect someone to wave a magic wand over what increasingly appears to be a moribund party and revive it with the sheer force of his personality or charisma, you are asking for too much. And remember that Rahul Gandhi is not a Barrack Obama. You need real genius to pull off that kind of a miracle.

To be fair, there is nothing terribly wrong with Rahul Gandhi. But he is simply not capable of working out a new paradigm for the party or for Indian politics at large. He is no doubt a good guy, but he is not competent to handle the enormous load he has been stuck with. There is a problem with this role that he is supposed to be taking on. On the one hand, he is under training — a large team of intellectuals is supposedly engaged in training him to take charge and become a good politician. On the other hand, he is supposed to be also playing a leader to the party and a potential PM. This is like some on-the-job-training and it doesn’t work.

It is clear that Rahul is only an average political talent. And he is incapable of dealing with the huge agenda the Congress has piled on him. Why just him? Any inexperienced young politician would crack under it. It is terrible to be brought into politics as though you were born to rule. Or to be told that one has to come to power because one is born into a certain family. Everyone in the Congress has to dwarf himself or herself in the public arena so that Rahul can appear tallest and can shine like no other. He is not treated like a young person who is finding his feet in politics. He has been invested with almost semi-divine powers to prop up the Congress’ sagging fortunes.

Read the full story here.

(Madhu Kishwar is a senior fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies.)

Rich MPs, poor people

Another election season is upon us. It’s a good idea to focus on more basic questions: Do political representatives make any difference, to the state they’re from, or to the castes they represent; how representative are our MLAs/MPs; does only money-power matter? Do representatives from poorer states tend to be relatively wealthier in comparison to their population, than those from richer states? Does being rich ensure electoral success or is it tied to the performance of the party? Using data from Empowering India initiative, Sunil Jain seeks some answers in his column in Business Standard.

Now that election season is upon us, we’ll be bombarded by all manner of analyses, pre-election surveys on voting behaviour, post-election analyses on whether people voted their caste or just cast their vote; and so on. Till then, it’s a good idea to focus on more basic questions: Do political representatives make any difference, to the state they’re from, or to the castes they represent (are OBCs in Bihar any better off after 15 years of Lalu-raj?); indeed, are our MLAs/MPs even representative in the true sense of the term; does only money-power matter?

As for whether our MPs/MLAs are representative of us, the answer is mostly a ‘no’. By and large, the poorer the state, the richer the MP/MLA. One way of rationalising this is to say that political leaders have always belonged to the aristocracy — one look at the education levels of our MPs/MLAs, however, makes it clear this is not the case here. That this should happen, though, is no surprise — the poorer a state, the higher the chances of it being badly governed, and so the greater the scope/need for MPs/MLAs to have the power to dispense favours. Visit the Liberty Institute’s website (http://www.empoweringindia.org/new/home.aspx) if you want a lot more data, to construct and run econometric models especially.

• Maharashtra has amongst the highest per capita incomes in India (if you leave out small states like Delhi) and, on average, its MPs declared assets of around Rs 110 lakh in the 2004 Lok Sabha elections, ranging from Rs 64 lakh for the Shiv Sena to Rs 191 lakh for the Congress Party (Rs 65 lakh for Shiv Sena MLAs to Rs 133 lakh for Congress MLAs). Surprisingly, however, Andhra Pradesh, which has a 30 per cent lower per capita income, has MPs whose average assets are around 4.5 times as high at Rs 490 lakh (TDP MLAs in Andhra had an average asset-base of Rs 190 lakh and the figure was Rs 116 lakh for Congress MLAs); Punjab MPs are the richest (its per capita income is around a tenth lower but its MPs are around six times as wealthy with average assets of Rs 672 lakh).
• Gujarat MPs/MLAs are the paragon of virtue when it comes to their wealth (the state’s per capita is around 8 per cent lower than Maharashtra and its MPs have assets which are around 40 per cent lower). Poorer states like Bihar, Uttar Pradesh (UP) and Madhya Pradesh are the real shocker. Bihar’s per capita income is a fifth that of Maharashtra, yet its MPs are just a tenth less wealthy (Rs 101 lakh for Bihar versus Rs 110 lakh for Maharashtra) — Bihar MLAs, however, have assets that average around Rs 20 lakh as compared to three-four times that for Maharashtra MLAs. UP, similarly, has a per capita income that’s a little over a third that of Maharashtra, but its MPs are a third wealthier. Madhya Pradesh has a per capita income that’s 40 per cent that of Maharashtra, but its MPs are just 14 per cent less wealthy.

Read the full story here:
Indefenceofliberty
Business Standard

India Today (cover story, 23 Feb'09): Weighing the elected representatives on the money scale

Here’s a glance at the people's representatives, who are to work for people’s betterment, through the money glasses. The amount of money the report talks about is unfathomable, the zeroes eye-widening, and a feeling arising within you - ‘How come India is still poor?’
India Today's cover story of the 23th February carried an analysis on the richest MPs and MLAs in India.

“In a country where over 77 per cent of the populace, or an estimated 836 million people, earn an income of Rs 20 per day and over 300 million are living below the poverty line, nearly half the Rajya Sabha members and nearly a third of those from the Lok Sabha are worth a crore and more. Just the top ten Rajya Sabha members and the top ten Lok Sabha members have reported a cumulative net asset worth Rs 1,500 crore. The 10 top losers in the last Lok Sabha polls — including Nyimthungo of Nagaland who reported total assets of Rs 9,005 crore — is Rs 9,329 crore. Members of legislative assemblies seem wealthier than many MPs. The top five MLAs across the 30 states are worth Rs 2,042 crore. Of these 150 crorepati MLAs, 59 don’t even have a PAN card,” says the cover story of India Today.

The story used the data available on the EmpoweringIndia.org to conduct the analyses about the elected representatives.

Read the full story here: http://indiatoday.intoday.in/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=28888&Itemid=1&issueid=93&sectionid=30&limit=1&limitstart=1