03-23-2006, 09:24 AM
<b>Democracy adjourned </b><!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->osted online: Thursday, March 23, 2006 at 0000 hrsÂ
To adjourn Parliament in order to protect an ordinance reflects political morality at its lowest. It does more than that. It demonstrates astonishingly poor political judgment and a disturbing lack of sensitivity to democratic norms. This adjournment could go down as one of the lowest points in the UPA governmentâs tenure, and one that it could come to regret deeply. Whether the government likes it or not, it will be interpreted as a move to protect just one person in that long list of MPs who potentially face disqualification under the Parliament (Prevention of Disqualification) Act, 1959, and that person is Congress President Sonia Gandhi, and chairperson of the National Advisory Council. Egregious, too, is the move â front-paged exclusively in the Express â to promulgate an ordinance in the opportunistic manner that the Manmohan Singh government has sought to do. A mature democracy disdains the ordinance route, although the UPA government has taken recourse to it, time and again, in the nearly two years of its existence. Bypassing Parliament by exploiting the short recess between the two halves of the Budget session reveals an over-zealous executive mind that has little patience with the often burdensome nitty-gritty of democratic due process. The pity about this entire crisis is that it is all so unnecessary. The issue that triggered it is a bad law that has long passed its âsell byâ date. What had constituted an office of profit, or what made for the âconflict of interestâ in the late fifties, when the Parliament (Prevention of Disqualification) Act was first passed, has become almost farcical today. At that point, it was the government that was the largest, and possibly sole, source of patronage. It is ridiculous that today, when MPs with innumerable business interests and sitting in crucial select committees, do not attract the penalities inherent in this law, those who head government committees â some innocuous in the extreme like the one Jaya Bachchan does â should do so. The illogical and antiquitarian nature of such a law should have attracted the legal accumen, across party lines, that Parliament seems to be so richly endowed with. Instead, it has been used as an instrument of political sparring. The Congressâs delight in Samajwadi Party MP Jaya Bachchanâs discomfiture, soon returned to haunt it. A salutary lesson of how bitter political skirmishes can go so horribly wrong. Today, Indian democracy has had to pay the price for this misguided wrangling.
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To adjourn Parliament in order to protect an ordinance reflects political morality at its lowest. It does more than that. It demonstrates astonishingly poor political judgment and a disturbing lack of sensitivity to democratic norms. This adjournment could go down as one of the lowest points in the UPA governmentâs tenure, and one that it could come to regret deeply. Whether the government likes it or not, it will be interpreted as a move to protect just one person in that long list of MPs who potentially face disqualification under the Parliament (Prevention of Disqualification) Act, 1959, and that person is Congress President Sonia Gandhi, and chairperson of the National Advisory Council. Egregious, too, is the move â front-paged exclusively in the Express â to promulgate an ordinance in the opportunistic manner that the Manmohan Singh government has sought to do. A mature democracy disdains the ordinance route, although the UPA government has taken recourse to it, time and again, in the nearly two years of its existence. Bypassing Parliament by exploiting the short recess between the two halves of the Budget session reveals an over-zealous executive mind that has little patience with the often burdensome nitty-gritty of democratic due process. The pity about this entire crisis is that it is all so unnecessary. The issue that triggered it is a bad law that has long passed its âsell byâ date. What had constituted an office of profit, or what made for the âconflict of interestâ in the late fifties, when the Parliament (Prevention of Disqualification) Act was first passed, has become almost farcical today. At that point, it was the government that was the largest, and possibly sole, source of patronage. It is ridiculous that today, when MPs with innumerable business interests and sitting in crucial select committees, do not attract the penalities inherent in this law, those who head government committees â some innocuous in the extreme like the one Jaya Bachchan does â should do so. The illogical and antiquitarian nature of such a law should have attracted the legal accumen, across party lines, that Parliament seems to be so richly endowed with. Instead, it has been used as an instrument of political sparring. The Congressâs delight in Samajwadi Party MP Jaya Bachchanâs discomfiture, soon returned to haunt it. A salutary lesson of how bitter political skirmishes can go so horribly wrong. Today, Indian democracy has had to pay the price for this misguided wrangling.
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