A trust deficit in Parliament

Row over unparliamentary words and protests are rooted in political hostilities. Fix this now

The run-up to the monsoon session is proving to be unusually stormy. First, Opposition parties accused the government of trying to gag free speech in Parliament after the Lok Sabha secretariat issued a list of “unparliamentary words”. That the exercise was decades-old or that there was no effective ban on any word (a fact clarified late on Thursday by Lok Sabha speaker Om Birla) was of little consequence in front of a barrage of outrage by some Opposition leaders and civil society members. A day later, a notification by the Rajya Sabha secretariat that demonstrations, protests, dharnas, fast, or religious ceremonies are not allowed in the precincts of Parliament has kicked up a similar row. Again, the authorities clarified that it is an old rule and doesn’t bar members from registering their protest on the floor of the House but it failed to placate some Opposition members who see it as a way to curb their right to free expression.

At one level, these rows seem trite. After all, in both cases, exercises that had run for years without sparking any controversy suddenly found themselves as the subject of the Opposition’s ire. But at another, they point towards a breakdown of the democratic compact between the government and the Opposition and a loss of trust. As the seat of democracy, Parliament has functioned as a forum for deliberation and compromise for drafting laws and steering government policy. Yet, in recent decades, its ability to make ideologically and politically divergent politicians find common ground has eroded. Increasingly, bills are being passed with little debate or space for discussion, fewer pieces of legislation are being referred to parliamentary committees for deeper and more critical assessment, and electoral hostilities are spilling over to the floor of the House. In the last monsoon session, 19 bills were passed without debate. And in the second term of the United Progressive Alliance government, 20 bills were approved in five minutes or less, according to data from PRS Legislative Research.

This points to worrying structural infirmities in the lawmaking process, where governments and the Opposition are finding it difficult to bridge the trust deficit opened up by political hostilities and electoral barbs, in an environment where one party dominates the polity and others feel their space squeezed. This is a recipe for pandemonium in the House, and will need the government to adopt an accommodative stance and the Opposition to be more reasonable to defuse tensions.