Assessing functioning and history of India’s Parliament

The perception that India’s Parliament is a colonial imprint that is out of sync with an independent India is a refrain that has often been repeated over the last 75 years of modern Indian democracy. But a new book on Parliament by the veteran scholar Ronojoy Sen addresses this thesis head-on and provides a wartsand-all assessment of India’s legislative chamber. Sen joined host Milan Vaishnav on this week’s episode of Grand Tamasha, a podcast that is jointly produced by HT and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, to talk about his book, House of the People: Parliament and the Making of Indian Democracy.

Sen parts with those who think India’s Parliament is a pale imitation of its British counterpart. “What India adopted was essentially the British model but it’s also important to note that certain tweaks were made,” argued Sen, a senior research fellow at the Institute of South Asia Studies at the National University of Singapore. “It was the scale and diversity of India’s Parliament that charted a new course for the Indian version of the Westminster system.”

Sen noted that a former British Prime Minister—anthony Eden—was one of the first to recognise this, calling the Indian Parliament a “multiplied” reproduction of the British House of Commons.

In recent years, Parliament has also been criticised for being out of touch with the proverbial aam aadmi given the massive age discrepancy between the average Member of Parliament (MP) and the average Indian. According to Sen, “this current Parliament is marginally younger than the earlier ones, but still the average age is in the mid-tolate 50s whereas India is a very young nation” with the majority of the country under the age of 30. However, Sen is quick to note one cannot draw a straight line from the age of parliamentarians to judgments about its effectiveness. If you look at participation in debates, who asks parliamentary questions, who attends Parliament, and so forth, said Sen, younger MPS actually fare much worse than their older counterparts.

However, he cautions that there are other serious “representational deficits” Indians should be concerned about. These deficits have the capacity to distort the practice of representation, if left unchecked. For instance, Sen decries the low numbers of women in Parliament today. He noted that “India’s number of women representatives is far lower than the global average. And, in fact, it is much lower than its South Asian numbers…partly because Bangladesh and Pakistan have quotas for women which India has up till now not managed to do.”

He also observed that there is a serious misalignment between the religious make-up of Parliament and that of the general population. Sen remarked that fewer than four percent of this current Parliament are Muslim while this community comprises roughly 15 percent of the population.