Should the privileges of MPs be codified?

The day Jawaharlal Nehru put the Member of Parliament at Number 32 in the Warrant of Precedence, the MP became an entity and an increasingly high and mighty person. Until then an MP had not been a VIP. An IP at the most, he had to be content to be placed after distinguished persons if they had to be classed together in a committee, stationary or peripatetic. Since he achieved some precedence, the MP has been considered, and considers himself to be, more important than other persons, however distinguished they may be in any walk of life. Even if he is a nonentity intellectually, he is ranked socially at home and abroad as more important than somebody else. Even if he is voiceless, as most Indian MPs are, he carries greater authority. The MP, of course, should have come into his own after 1952 when the first general election was held under the Constitution and adult suffrage introduced. However undistinguished, he is thus a product of adult suffrage which a writer, professor, artist, medical practitioner, lawyer or intellectual, however, distinguished, cannot claim to be.

Even if an artist or intellectual is infinitely better known, it is not through adult suffrage, and the MP or the MLA, as the case may be, can always say: “I won by two lakh or three lakh votes. How many do you represent?” That is why the most silent and inarticulate of MPs can assume authority and claim attention that the non-MP cannot. Along with this importance or self-importance, by right, go a number of privileges, on all kinds of pretext, pleasures and perks. But thereby hangs a different tale, as Kipling might say. The rights that were conferred only on knights and burghers or squires, apart from barons, with Simon de Montfort’s Model Parliament in England in a corner of Europe, then a country of just two million people, have now become the rights of common men all over the world, men who can manage to get a party ticket, and get elected.

Now they are like petrified rights; not a mere matter of privileges, pleasures and even perquisites but a share in power. This power is not conceded automatically to the majority party or the party in power in a parliamentary democracy but can be claimed also by MPs belonging to the Opposition parties. In Britain, for instance, all MPs, to whichever side they might belong, are considered part of the Establishment.

In plunging inevitably into adult suffrage in conditions of mass illiteracy, India perhaps showed more faith than wisdom. It has understandably meant vulgarity, debasement and corruption, though it means confidence in the people’s fitful assertions of their political will. It is a pity that political science, which is still as much a dismal science as economics once was, and still is where monetary policies are concerned, has not tried to study the exact play of this will. It will not do to deplore the absence of dignity as the oligarchs once sneered at the first experiments in democracy, or go to the extent of saying, as Bismarck said, that universal suffrage is the government of a house by its nursery, which may be why many modern political treatises read like comics.

Why do men still want to be legislators? Labouchere, the Victorian cynic and parliamentary wit, said: “Some of them enter parliament because they have been local bulls of Bashan and consider that in localities where they have roared and pawed the ground, they will be even more important than heretofore; some because they want to have a try at climbing the greasy pole of office; some because they have heard that the House of Commons is the best club in London; some because they delude themselves that they are orators; some for want of anything better to do; some because they want to make a bit out of company promoting; and some because they have a vague notion that they are going to benefit their country by their devotion to legislative business.”

Among State legislators there are more local bulls of Bashan than in parliament. Labou- chere’s varieties can be found amidst us. But the increase in the number of those who are only after money or power or both because money means power and power means money, and the decrease in the legislative talent of many of those elected to the legislatures is alarming. There has been no precise study of the social and economic background of the legislator class in India, unlike Namier’s laborious studies of Whig and Tory parliamentarians. The ‘Who’s who’ of the two Houses gives little information, and whatever little there is has not been assessed from any point of view.

There were once proud claims to aristocratic lineage, as when a Chinese who descended from Confucius would be ashamed of a robber-baron pedigree, or when a Southern Senator in the USA could boast that he had married into “the first family to cross the Yadkin on wheels”. Now politicians are proud of their purses, which have become the main attraction for political parties in search of candidates. There is little value for gentlemen or scholars or those who are articulate, for parties and bosses have become cynical about the value of embryonic statesmen. As in the USA, they are treated as ‘the kept women of politics’. In this whirlpool of chance and change, it is not legislative aptitude that is the main draw, and it does not seem to matter if MPs are paid more or given more perquisites, in addition to what the income tax authorities choose to describe as ‘additional income’.

Corruption is beyond their knowledge or treatment. They are helpless victims of the system or its beneficiaries. If they have some pity for the people of the country, they should not tax them more for their own comfort. The memoirs of British political leaders show how at the end of their public services they are almost always poorer than they were when they started. Public service in India, however, is perceived by the masses as a means of getting rich. It may be that other countries pay more to their MPs, but those are affluent countries. But in a country of so many poor people as India, public service loses all meaning if it is a way of making men richer.

Anyway, two eminent constitutional authorities have explained why the privileges of MPs should be codified. Former Secretary-General of the Lok Sabha S.L.Shakdhar has said that privileges of MPs and MLAs should be codified as parliamentary practices had lost their importance in the present-day context. Codification would help avoid bitterness between the Press and the elected representatives, he argued.

The Speakers’ powers were enormous and needed curtailment as the Speakers were ‘the servants of the House, not its masters’. Only unparliamentary remarks should not go on record. Speakers are not subject to any criticism as it amounts to criticism of the House that is supreme. However, MPs could deal with the Speakers’ sins of omission and commission, Shakdhar feels. Former judge of the Supreme Court V.R.Krishna Iyer, in his inimitable style, said: “The need to codify the privileges of legislators, consistent with the freedom of the Press which is of paramount value as the Fourth Estate in a democracy, is more urgent now than it ever before was because of the frequent arbitrariness of our Hon’ble Speakers and Hon’ble legislators.”

“The right to personal liberty, when crushed by the House or its symbol, Mr. Speaker, could not be a casualty if Article 21 (Protection of life and personal liberty), read with Articles 19 (rights regarding freedom of speech, etc.,) and Article 14 (equality before law) were not to be black-letter buffoonery. In a landmark case involving Maneka Gandhi, the highest court declared the law that personal liberty could not be deprived without a procedure which is fair, just and reasonable,” Justice Iyer explained. It is, however, debatable if MPs would agree to such curtailment of the almost unlimited freedom and privilege that they now enjoy.

- MV