A K Bhattacharya: Legislators & their double standards

NEW DELHI DIARY

A few years ago, Indian parliamentarians passed a legislative Bill in record time. The Bill sought to increase their salaries and perquisites. There was no opposition to the Bill, no debate and no demand for referring it to a standing committee of Parliament.

The unanimity witnessed then was almost similar when the controversial Office of Profits Bill came up for discussion in Parliament a few weeks ago. At that time also, most parliamentarians drowned their ideological differences, if any, and ensured the passage of a Bill that named a host of new posts that would not be treated as offices of profit and whose occupancy by a member of Parliament would not attract the provisions of disqualification from either of the Houses.

Most political parties would have gained from this exercise, which was a complete violation of the spirit in which the original piece of legislation was enacted. The Left parties too would have benefitted from this exercise and since they provide crucial support to the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government; the Bill was passed without any problem. Earlier, Congress chief Sonia Gandhi had tried to reclaim her saintly halo by resigning her Lok Sabha seat and the post of the chairperson of the National Advisory Council, after all this became an ugly political controversy.

President APJ Abdul Kalam had his reservations about the new piece of legislation and for good reasons. He sent the Bill back to Parliament for its reconsideration. The UPA government now has plans to present the amendment Bill again before Parliament. Whether the Bill would be amended to address the President's concerns is not yet clear.

But the decision to present the Bill again to Parliament, in the safe knowledge that this time the President cannot but clear it, smacks of a certain attitude. That attitude is: We couldn't care less about the concerns expressed by someone who happens to be the country's President.

There is another aspect of this deplorable attitude. Parliamentarians follow double standards when it comes to performing their role as legislators. They will cite all kinds of reasons including ideology and their concern for poor people when they examine any legislative proposal that does not directly affect them. Thus, the Labour Reforms Bill will never get taken up in Parliament, let alone be passed and the Pension Reforms Bill will be opposed by Left parliamentarians on ideological grounds.

But the same parliamentarians will ignore their differences with each other when they consider a proposal that benefits them as a class. Increasing their salaries and widening the scope of exemptions in the Office of Profit Bill are both examples of such behaviour. And now comes yet another proposal from the UPA government our parliamentarians are most likely to endorse wholeheartedly.

This is about allotting land for the national political parties in institutional areas in Delhi. At present, many of these political parties (with the notable exception of CPI-M, CPI and a few others) are headquartered in government bungalows in New Delhi. Apparently, these political parties are upset that they will now be required to vacate the government bungalows they now occupy, paying a rent that is a fraction of what they would have to shell out if they were to operate from any other premises in an institutional area. But they have little choice in the matter because the Supreme Court had decreed some time back that political parties must vacate government bungalows in New Delhi within a stipulated period of time.

So, such opposition should be seen only as posturing by them so that they can get a better deal when land in an institutional area is allotted. All a political party needs""to qualify for a piece of land in an institutional area in the country's Capital""is to have seven seats in Parliament from among its members. The irony of the entire development is that the present debate is on why political parties with less than seven seats in Parliament have been excluded from this facility. But nobody is questioning why at all the government should worry about allotting land for political parties. The country's apex court may have rightly ordered that government bungalows should not be used for housing political parties. But there is no logic for the government to allot land for the political parties.

Why can't the responsibility of finding land for their offices be left to the political parties? The problem perhaps lies in the fact that almost all the big national parties at present occupy prime bungalows in New Delhi and use them as their headquarters. The Congress operates from Akbar Road, the BJP from Ashok Road, the Samajwadi Party from Copernicus Marg, and the Bahujan Samaj Party from Gurdwara Rakabganj Road.

None of these parties is so poor that it cannot find land or a new office for itself. The UPA government's decision to provide alternative land for these political parties is therefore baffling. The only way one can explain it is that it did not want to take on the combined opposition of parliamentarians belonging to different political parties, including the Congress, if no alternative land was given to them. Not surprisingly, political parties are not discussing if such allotment of land is proper. They are debating how the norms could be relaxed so that they could grab some more land for their new offices.

akb@business-standard.com