Makers of our laws

In my last two columns I looked at civil society and law-making from a global and then a national perspective. Under the Constitution of India, Parliament is the supreme legislative body at the national level. Even “civil society” representatives do not dispute the fact that only Parliament makes laws that affect the entire country and therefore help shape its society.
The most important aspect of legislation lies in its vital sociological ramifications — think, for example, of the reservations policy for certain castes, decided by Parliament, which has proved a remarkable tool of social mobility and political transformation. Parliament has also not been found wanting in creating, through legislation, many institutions and mechanisms which today address issues crucial to the well-being of our society, for example national level bodies like the National Human Rights Commission or the National Commission for Backward Classes — all created as specific policy initiatives for various sections of our society.
The process of democratic elections in India, involving a multiplicity of political parties organised to reflect any conceivable interest and ideology, ensures the representative character of Parliament. This is what entitles MPs to make laws: laws must be made by those who are truly representative of the society they are seeking to regulate, and who are bound by oath to act for the fair and equal welfare of all sections of the people they are constitutionally elected to represent.
One defining feature of the parliamentary system, as opposed to the Presidential (an alternative I myself would have preferred for other reasons), is that the executive emerges from the legislature and is sustained by its ability to maintain a legislative majority. In our system, therefore, the executive — the government — introduces the laws and uses its legislative majority to pass them. Of course, it is usually open to the views of other members, including those belonging to the Opposition parties, and makes necessary modifications to its draft bills before passage, in order to command as wide a consensus as possible. But it is not obliged to do so, as long as it enjoys a secure majority. And unlike, say, the US Congress, where any representative or senator can initiate and steer legislation, in the Indian Parliament it is almost always the government which does so.
Lawmaking anywhere is a complex process and this is all the more true in a multi-faceted, multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, multi-religious federal state like India. The formulation and enactment of a law which has all-India ramifications cannot be considered in isolation from other factors. The political ones, of course, but there are also administrative, legal, financial and technical factors that have to be considered (for example, a law may have financial implications of which the government has to take cognisance). Therefore, in the Indian parliamentary system, law-making has necessarily to be a function devolving on the executive and ratified through Parliament.
There are two important features of the constitutional legislative process which are relevant in this context. First, our parliamentary rules and procedures provide for the initiation of legislation by private members also. True, only a handful of private members’ bills have been passed in the history of the Indian Parliament. But there have been many instances where the introduction of private members’ bills — even where those bills did not themselves pass — expedited the process of government legislation on those very subjects. For example, K.V. Raghunath Reddy introduced a Companies (Amendment) Bill in the Rajya Sabha in August, 1963. Though it wasn’t passed in that form, the government brought forward its own bill incorpora- ting his amendments and enacted it. A similar story occurred when, after rejecting bills proposed by Atal Behari Vajpayee in 1964 and Chitta Basu in 1967 to ban political contributions by business houses, the Indira Gandhi government accepted their suggestions and in 1969 enacted legislation restricting such contributions. Similarily, very few people know that the change of name of Madras state to Tamil Nadu in 1967 was prefigured in a private member’s Constitution (Amendment) Bill in 1961 by Bhupesh Gupta! Recently, Congress MP Manish Tewari introduced a private member’s bill to regulate India’s national intelligence agencies. Whether it passes or not, it will have had the undeniable effect of placing the issue of intelligence reform on the agenda, and the media coverage of his initiative alone has given prominence to the issue involved.
Since May 1952, more than 3,000 private members’ bills have been introduced in the Lok Sabha alone, of which 14 have found their way into the statute book, including the Muslim Wakfs Bill, 1952, the Hindu Marriage (Amendment) Bill, 1964 and the Supreme Court (Enlargement of Criminal Appellate Jurisdiction) Bill, 1968, all significant pieces of legislation that have had a serious impact on our country. But many other MPs’ ideas may turn up in a different form in future government legislation.
The second feature worth mentioning is the system of referring bills to the Standing Committees of Parliament for detailed examination after their introduction. This provides an opportunity for the expression of wide-ranging and diverse opinions on its contents, including by Opposition members, which may not be possible on the floor of the House due to lack of time. The standing committees are authorised to go in depth into the provisions of the bills, and to invite the opinion of the general public, including civil society organisations who may wish to provide suggestions and detailed inputs on the various provisions co- ntained or omitted therein. Thus Anna Hazare and his representatives have been invited to depose before the standing committee on law and justice. It is not credible, therefore, to argue, as some have, that the public has no say in the process of law- making and that it is left purely in the hands of representatives whom they may have once voted into power but with whose views they are no longer in sympathy.
So we have a system where civil society elects its lawmakers, and then continues to influence them in the process of lawmaking. I will rest my case in my next column.

The writer is a member of Parliament from Kerala’s Thiruvananthapuram constituency