Edits

Editorials

India Today, January 4, 1999
January 4, 1999

Act Your Age

Decorum is a prerequisite for democracy. Try telling the MPs that.

Edits Each time a parliamentary session begins, India hopes the repositories of its democratic trust will work hard, legislate after informed debate and take part in collective and constructive governance. Each time a parliamentary session ends, India's hopes lie dashed, its MPs having set new standards in infamy. The recent winter session is a case in point. Aside from the usual filibustering, there was the shame of members agitating while the national song, Vande Mataram, was being sung. The razor-thin divide between the treasury and opposition benches in the Lok Sabha should be a symbol of India's keenly contested elections. Instead, it has become the excuse to scupper the legislature. Bills can be discussed and defeated, if the proposing MP's case is not persuasive enough. This standard parliamentary practice is in tatters today. So ludicrous is the situation that while introducing bills ministers stand in the third or fourth row rather than the first, guarded as it were by fellow cabinet members. The reason: to prevent the papers from being snatched and destroyed. In mid-1998 an MP was even accused of carrying a pistol into the Lok Sabha. The allegation may have been untrue; the tragedy is it was so believable.

In the very week in which the legislation on patents and on the formation of new states created such a tumult, the House of Representatives impeached President Bill Clinton in a process which was marked by copious quantities of sleaze and tension -- but was conducted with clockwork precision. India adopted the Westminster model of governance without assimilating the Westminster model of parliamentary values. The snide remarks, the ideological schism, the ferocious rivalry: Conservative and Labour hardliners can be as fiercely opposed to each other as, say, the Samajwadi Party and the BJP. Yet, in London the rules of the game remain sacrosanct. In Delhi they are eminently negotiable. Today it's the rules; some day the game itself may be deemed dispensable.

Dishonouring JP

Why posthumous awards amount to rewriting history.

Edits Even his political opponents -- and he had plenty -- would acknowledge that Jayaprakash Narayan was extremely deserving of the Bharat Ratna. Yet it does no credit to "JP", as the great man was known, to award him India's supreme civilian honour 20 years after his death. There is always something suspicious about posthumous awards. In the early '90s, P.V. Narasimha Rao's government gave Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose the Bharat Ratna at the height of the then prime minister's attempt to insulate the Congress from the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. The problem was the recognition came a good four decades after Patel and Bose had departed from public life. Now the BJP-led coalition's rivals are reading meanings into the conferment of the Ratna on JP. It is being seen in the context of a larger attempt to reinvoke the anti-Emergency, anti-Congress spirit which JP embodied and which spurred so many in the current ruling alliance as well as in the nebulous "third front".

The manipulation of national symbols is not unique to the BJP. Nevertheless only an unwholesome polity can revel in the post-facto political appropriation of what should be a shared legacy. In the short run, these measures serve a political purpose and even make for electoral gains. Thus it is not inconceivable that a backward caste leader from Bihar will now demand the Param Vir Chakra for Chandragupta Maurya or a party seeking to cultivate a Muslim vote bank will promise to give Emperor Akbar the Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding. This may sound ridiculous but it is entirely in keeping with a mindset which doesn't think twice before making a plaything of history. Rather than pointing to the glory of those long gone, the BJP regime would do well to unearth the talent which lies unsung in contemporary India.

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