Learned lessons from failed democracies

The curtailment of the monsoon session of Parliament on September 10 ‚ six days earlier than scheduled ‚ because of persistent unruly behaviour of members of the Lok Sabha is proof that the country‚s parliamentary system of government is becoming increasingly imperiled. During the truncated monsoon session, the Lok Sabha should have worked for six hours per day for 23 days. Instead it conducted its legislative business for an average four hours per day for only 17 days. Likewise the Rajya Sabha should have worked for five hours per day but it averaged only three hours. Given that every minute of parliamentary time is valued at Rs.20,000, the premature adjournment of the monsoon session cost taxpayers a massive Rs.16.08 crore in lost parliamentary time. The purpose and raison d‚etre of Parliament is to legislate laws for orderly governance of the country. Under elaborately detailed rules of both houses of Parliament, proposed legislation is required to be scrutinised and thoroughly debated so that fair and just legislation is enacted for the benefit of the citizenry. To ensure this outcome, members of Parliament are handsomely remunerated in terms of pay and perquisites. But in the monsoon session against the scheduled 25 Bills, only 11 were passed and against the 25 scheduled to be introduced, only 16 were. As a result while at the beginning of the monsoon session 71 Bills were pending, now the number of pending Bills has risen to 74. And given that work shirking and unruly behaviour of MPs witnessed in the monsoon session is the rule rather than exception, it‚s hardly surprising that some Bills (such as the Private Universities Bill, 1995) have been awaiting debate and legislation for decades. The devaluation of Parliament by the people‚s elected representatives is particularly unfortunate at this juncture in the history of the subcontinent, when democratic systems of governance have collapsed across South Asia. In particular this country‚s foolish legislators don‚t seem to have drawn any lessons from the eclipse of parliamentary democracy in neigbouring Pakistan and Bangladesh where military dictatorships (with the broad approval of their people) have supplanted democratically elected governments. Currently Pakistan is experiencing a period of dangerous political turmoil which could result in prolonged civic insurrection and rioting, following the desperate come back attempts of former prime ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif who squandered their political capital by permitting their party members to devalue Pakistan‚s parliamentary institutions. It is pertinent to remember that General Musharaff had widespread support when he engineered an army coup d‚etat against the Nawaz Sharif government in 1999 because the public and the establishment were thoroughly disillusioned by the ineffectiveness of Pakistan‚s democratically elected leaders to provide orderly government. As people groan under the weight of unjust laws and continuously witness the unseemly legislative paralysis of Parliament, India‚s much vaunted democratic experiment seems to be headed the same way. Root causes of rough-n-ready mob justiceThe rising incidence of vigilante justice, lynching and public humiliation of petty criminals across the country by angry…