Parliament: A curious Indian institution

The current visit to India of the Speaker of the UK House of Commons, John Bercow, offers an amusing reminder of the similarities and differences between our two Parliaments — one the Mother of all Parliaments, the other the vividly coloured offspring of India’s political miscegenation with Britain.
In his interactions with Indian parliamentarians, Mr Bercow has been suitably respectful of the dissimilarities in procedures and practices between the institution over which he presides and its counterpart in New Delhi. Indian politicians have long been proud of the Parliamentary system we adopted upon Independence, patterned as it was on Britain’s Westminster model. The choice was not accidental. India’s nationalist leaders had aspired to enjoy the democracy that their colonial rulers had long denied them, and had convinced themselves the British system (from whose benefits they were excluded) must therefore be the best. When a future British Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, travelled 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 our veteran Parliamentarians — several of whom had been educated in England and watched British parliamentary traditions with admiration — revelled in the authenticity of their ways. Indian MPs still thump their desks in approbation, rather than applauding by clapping their hands. When bills are put to a vote, an affirmative call is still “aye”, rather than “yes”. An Anglophile Communist MP, Prof. Hiren Mukherjee, boasted in the 1950s that a visiting British Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, had commented to him that the Indian Parliament was in every respect like the British one. Even to a Communist, that was a compliment to be proud of.
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 our federal system have already witnessed scenes of furniture overthrown, microphones ripped out and slippers flung by unruly legislators, not to mention fisticuffs and garments torn in scuffles among politicians. While things have not yet come to such a pass 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 honoured in the breach. Equally striking is the impunity with which lawmakers flout the rules they are elected to uphold.
There was a time when misbehaviour was firmly dealt with. Many newspaper readers of my generation (there were no cameras in the houses of Parliament then) will recall the photograph of the burly socialist MP, Raj Narain, a former wrestl-er, being bodily carried out of the House by four attendants for shouting out of turn and disobeying the Speaker’s orders to resume 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 were suspended from membership 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, out of a desire to allow the Opposition its space in a system where party-line voting determines most voting outcomes. In India, a raucous mob of MPs descending on the well of the House, shouting slogans and waving placards usually prompts the Speaker to adjourn proceedings — sometimes for half an hour, sometimes longer, and sometimes for the day. Last year an entire five-week session was lost, with not a single day of business transacted, as the Opposition bayed daily for a JPC to be established on the telecom scandal. By contrast, as Mr Bercow delicately pointed out, while he did occasionally need to call on members to reduce their noise levels in the august chamber, he had never — never — actually needed to adjourn the House.
Four decades ago, in more gentlemanly times, an Opposition legislator had ended a debate — whose outcome, given the size of the Congress Party’s parliamentary majority in those days, was a foregone conclusion — with the words, “We have the arguments. You have the votes.” Years later this very MP, Atal Behari Vajpayee, would become Prime Minister himself, and pride himself in cutting as much slack as possible to the Opposition.
The result is a curiously Indian institution, where standards of behaviour prevail that would not be tolerated in most other 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. Their behaviour is enough to tax the patience of even that most gentle and patient of presiding officers, Speaker Meira Kumar. Yet she fully realises that the option of expelling offenders from the House, or even suspending them for the day — both actions entirely within the rules — are not really available to her, because of the uproar they would cause amongst MPs accustomed to laxer standards of enforcement. And then there is not much she can do if they actually refuse to leave when ordered to — a possibility Mr Bercow would not even need to contemplate.
In the UK, there is a tradition by which a newly-elected Speaker has to be physically dragged to the chair by his colleagues, as if reluctant to assume such a heavy responsibility. That was one British practice we didn’t emulate. Given what we put our Speakers through, perhaps it would have been more appropriate here!

Shashi Tharoor is a member of Parliament from Thiruvananthapuram