The country is undergoing a deepening COVID-19 crisis triggered by the Union government’s inability to address it with robust public policy measures. This crisis has been preceded by a more persistent crisis manifested in the calculated denial of the NDA regime to scrutiny of legislative proposals in parliament. This process has steadily gained in intensity over the past six years by employing a majority force in the Lok Sabha.
On Sunday, things reached a new low when the bills were approved by voice despite opposition MPs calling for a split – that is, a recorded vote – that the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) was clearly not in. winning conditions.
Opposition leaders organize protest in Rajya Sabha over suspension of eight MPs for agricultural laws, September 21, 2020. Photo: RSTV screenshot via PTI
The stubborn position taken by the regime in Rajya Sabha on September 20 against the demand of opposition parties, including the Biju Janata Dal, to relinquish agricultural laws – The Draft Law on Trade in Agricultural Products and Trade (Promotion and Facilitation), 2020 and the Agreement for the Guarantee of Prices and Agricultural Services (Empowerment and Protection) of Farmers, 2020 – to a select committee of the House for better scrutiny and examination, reflects their unwillingness to submit those bills to deeper levels of deliberation and consultation, avoiding the perspectives of parties.
Lack of legislative scrutiny
It is a well accepted proposition in a parliamentary democracy that lawmaking is a deliberative and consultative process. When the NDA regime deliberately went against the parliamentary convention to refer bills to the department-related standing committees for scrutiny and review right after it took office in 2014, it hit the root of the process hard. deliberative and consultative.
Neither agricultural Bills nor previous Bills – such as the Constitution amendment bill repealing the special status of Jammu and Kashmir and the bills on citizenship amendment, Triple Talaq bill and illicit activities (prevention) – they were referred to any of the parliamentary committees for in-depth deliberation on a non-partisan basis taking into account input from a variety of stakeholders.
Union Interior Minister Amit Shah speaks on the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill at the Lok Sabha. Photo: PTI
In the absence of such deep deliberation and free from partisan perspectives, bills or legislative proposals suffer from a deficit of legislative scrutiny.
The stark majority of the ruling party in the Lok Sabha and the accumulation of numbers in the Rajya Sabha have allowed it to pass legislation without frayed discussion and critical analysis of its provisions. As a result of a serious deficiency in scrutiny, such bills, when passed into law, lack sufficient reasoning and justification to merit wider public acceptance.
On January 16, 1948, Mahatma Gandhi had thoughtfully said: “No cabinet worthy of being representative of a great mass of humanity can afford to step up simply because it is likely to win the hasty applause of an unthinking audience. In the midst of the madness, shouldn’t our best representatives keep their sanity and bravely avoid a wreck of the ship of State under their leadership?
The lack of sanity reflected in pushing through numerous pieces of legislation in parliament by the NDA regime beginning in 2014 by avoiding bipartisan scrutiny in parliamentary committees has become a new normal, denying the very foundation of parliamentary democracy. .
Sanity demands that before legislation on sensitive issues is taken up in parliament for discussion and approval, the ruling regime must necessarily mobilize public opinion in its favor, so that the people willingly accept them and believe an environment conducive to its effective implementation. That is why it is said that better scrutiny leads to better governance.
The agrarian bills were not referred to the permanent parliamentary commissions related to the department or the Rajya Sabha select committee, as suggested by the opposition parties, for scrutiny and examination.
The declaration of the minister of agriculture – who piloted these bills in the Rajya Sabha – that there was no need to refer these bills to a House select committee because they are small bills, it sounds very hollow. In the absence of scrutiny and examination of bills at the committee level, vital ingredients that involve broader deliberation and consultation are completely absent.
Therefore, protests by farmers in many parts of India against these bills, even before they were dealt with in parliament, clearly indicated public resentment against the government neglecting scrutiny and examination of legislation, that aim to deeply impact their ways of disposing of Agricultural Products.
Members of various farmers’ organizations organize a protest against the ordinances related to agriculture, in the Hisar district, on Sunday, September 20, 2020. Photo: PTI
It means that these bills passed by parliament lack public support because their views and opinions were never taken into account when formulating them. It clearly makes the point that the law-making process when dictated by a crude majority of the ruling regime will not have the voluntary support of the people.
Legislation in pre-independence India
It is instructive that in pre-independence India there were occasions when the colonial authorities used to refer bills to the committees of the legislatures for discussion and nuanced deliberation before it became the law of the land.
The most obvious example was the Champaran Land Bill of 1917, which was drafted by the British authorities after Mahatma Gandhi launched his landmark Champaran Satyagraha in 1917 to abolish the forced cultivation of indigo on farmers’ land by mandate of British landowners.
At the heart of this momentous Satyagraha remained Mahatma Gandhi’s deliberation and consultation with farmers, British landowners, the colonial bureaucracy, the police, and ordinary people. It is instructive that Champaran Satyagraha, which began with Gandhi breaking the law, ended with the making of the law to end the forced planting of indigo.
And when the formulation of the law began and the Champaran Agrarian Bill was formulated and introduced in the Bihar-Odisha legislative assembly, many members of the assembly demanded its reference to the House select committee for scrutiny and examination. The British government granted it, and Mahatma Gandhi was even asked to examine the bill.
Indeed, it is tragic that one hundred and three years after Champaran Satyagraha, the NDA government is sabotaging legislative scrutiny of agricultural bills and using its stark majority to pass them, ignoring the principles of parliamentary oversight that are indispensable to adjust the laws. bills and improve their depth and content.
The approval of the agricultural bills in the Rajya Sabha by voice vote, and the opposition’s request to the vice president to put the bills to the vote, and the failure of the vice president to do so clearly demonstrate that the approval procedure of the laws have been violated.
Such a procedural lapse is a subversion of democracy. The need of the moment is to restore the culture of the deliberative and consultative law-making process and save the democratic process in parliament. – the highest representative body in the constitutional governance scheme.
YN Sahu is a former clerk of the Rajya Sabha secretariat.
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