Lessons from the 14th Lok Sabha

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Now that we have said good-bye to the Fourteenth Lok Sabha, there is need to evaluate the lacunae in our parliamentary functioning. There are fears that if we further postpone the diagnosis, we'd risk the health of our democracy. The disease is not new; the rot had set in quite a few Lok Sabhas ago. That is why there has to be a sense of urgency about finding a cure.

Forty-one MPs quit office in these acrimonious but compelling five years -- compelling all the more because multi-layered corruption was exposed on different occasions. We saw how MPs took money to ask questions, how they misused their local area development funds and even stumbled upon one who was unabashedly involved in human trafficking. Finally, we witnessed the shameful spectacle of wads of notes being dumped in the Well of the House when the world was watching the nuclear debate.

It will be gross injustice to blame the OBC and pro-Dalit political parties and dismiss the phenomenon as criminalisation of politics. That umbrella phrase has been overused with a middle-class bias to accuse post-Mandal politicians of having infused blatant criminality into the system. There is no denying that the backwards transported a dozen odd notorious politicians as people's representatives. True, wrongdoings of the past followed some of them around from court to court. Shibu Soren and Pappu Yadav didn't do the Lok Sabha proud by being convicted. Subsequent acquittal as in the case of Shibu Soren couldn't erase the taint.

But it was not the band of known lawbreakers who lent notoriety to the august House. It was the less infamous legislators, most of them first time MPs, who wreaked havoc and got embroiled in the series of scandals that rocked Parliament. We did not find usual suspects like a Taslimuddin or a J.P.Yadav in the list of MPs caught on camera gleefully accepting bribes. The tainted MPs (including eleven who were expelled and a larger number who were made to resign after they voted against their party's whip during the trust vote) constitute a very intriguing list. It couldn't have been predicted before the elections that a majority of them were corruptible.

That is why instead of passing on easy blame to the Mandal parties, we need to ascertain the nature of the systemic flaws that have now travelled deep. At the root of the problem lies the increasing pressure on the MP to deliver on the ground. Unlike the pristine Nehruvian Fifties, they are not expected to articulate and legislate. Parliamentary debate has become the domain of an educated handful. Parties have shifted their focus on candidates who are the likeliest to win and are not bothered about their wealth of knowledge or oratorical skills. Constituency management is the single biggest challenge that an MP confronts in his five-year term.

Aware that his fledgling career may be over in five years, the MPs are tempted to make hay while the sun is still smiling on them. They know that a fickle electorate may not be impressed with their serious efforts, even if they leave no stone unturned. Their party identity and symbol have stopped guaranteeing them facile and smooth victories. Elections in this country have become so fragmented, so municipal-ised that MPs really can't guess the magic formula, which would ensure re-election.

Democracy is being increasingly decentralised in this country and there are negative votes for every pothole or a defunct tube-well.

With the passage to Parliament becoming a steep incline, loyalty is hard to come by. It is not just a Mayawati, who sells constituencies to her nominees, who has been deserted by the numerous black sheep in her flock. Even the BJP, which borrows Sangh Parivar-trained grassroots politicians for the parliamentary battle, have been dealt serious blows by mercenaries and infidels. Being the party in power, the Congress has suffered the least.

The cynical, disillusioned MP, not really hopeful of achieving much in one five-year term, is a major crisis facing the Parliament. He will obviously be a commodity up for sale. We don't even allow him to perform better as a Parliamentarian by imposing outdated restrictions like Office of Profit. In an age when we are expecting MPs to compete with panchayat leaders and MLAs in grassroots development activity, we cannot keep him away from development boards and such other organizations that operate on the ground. Somnath Chatterjee cannot be hauled up for being the chairman of the Sriniketan-Shantiniketan Development Authority because that agency works for improvement of living standards in his constituency, Bolpur.

These are times when the MP cannot reduce himself to being a disciplined cog in a party mechanism. His voters expect him to have a bigger stature, an identity that grants him actual authority of the doer. Parliament is where he can only be useful for his party's headcount. Whenever he is in Delhi, he can better use his time by knocking on the doors of ministers and securing sanction for projects that will benefit his constituency. He has to become a facilitator, a part-executive, a man whom the government listens to. Contrast this role of today's Parliamentarian with the very limited interest that a Jawaharlal Nehru took in his constituency, Phulpur.

It is time to encourage legislative acumen and national perspective in our MPs. Our political parties are satisfied teaching them nothing but sloganeering that lends volume to the frequent Parliamentary confrontations. Our politics is based on suspicion, hostility and an overdose of animus. Criticism for criticism's sake has robbed the House of not just a sense of decorum but also of substance and worth. The real crisis is one of identity of the individual MP, the burden of altered and additional expectations and the inability of the party leadership to grant him adequate political space. We can no longer leave lawmaking in the hands of marionettes when puppeteers have lost the plot.