Cleaning up the legislature

The Supreme Court mooting the idea of special courts to expeditiously decide cases against MPs and MLAs, and the Election Commission (EC) supporting the proposal for banning convicted persons from contesting elections for life, seem to have created a general air of expectation. These developments have been felt to be light at the end of the tunnel. These are definitely positive developments and deserve to be supported. Reflecting on the goings-on on the electoral reforms front over the last two decades, however, does weaken the exuberance.

The talk of electoral reforms started within 20 years of Independence. The Goswami Committee report made a reference to 1967. Sure, elections in 2017 are held very differently than they were in 1967, but a look at how and why the changes did take place would be revealing. Let us take the example of reducing the impact of criminalisation of politics that the current developments pertain to.

The very first attempt to get candidates to disclose pending criminal cases against them met with stiff and sustained resistance from the entire political establishment. When the Delhi High Court made disclosure of such cases mandatory, the Union of India filed an appeal to the Supreme Court opposing the Delhi High Court decision. Several political parties intervened in that appeal supporting the government’s contention. When the Supreme Court upheld the High Court’s decision, the Parliament amended the law unanimously to prevent implementation of the judgement. The amendment was challenged in the Supreme Court and the court struck down the amendment as unconstitutional. This full process played out from 1999 to 2003.

If the political establishment had succeeded in blocking that disclosure, the data which has convinced the Supreme Court in the recent case would not have been available.

We can come from 2003 to 2013. In 2003, the Central Information Commission (CIC) declared, in a reasoned full bench decision, that six national political parties are public authorities under the RTI Act. Today, when 2017 is on its way out, these six biggest parties have blatantly refused to follow the directions of the highest statutory authority in the land for administering the Right to Information Act. The matter is now in the Supreme Court.

One more example: The EC sent a consolidated list of 22 proposals for electoral reforms to the government in May 2004. There is no prize for guessing what happened. After 12 years, the EC decided to take a comprehensive look in December 2016. The list sent to the government in December 2016 contained 47 proposals!

The purpose of mentioning these examples is to show that the entire political establishment has actively and vigorously opposed all attempts at reforming the electoral system, consistently over the years.

Objections are sometimes raised to the use of the expression ‘political establishment’ by saying that it is not fair or that it is wrong to paint the entire political class with the same brush since all politicians are not the same and many of them are good. This is obviously correct but when one looks at the behaviour of all the political parties put together as a group, and over the last 20 years, the inescapable conclusion is that this group does not want the existing system to change.

There are some curious facts. One, each of the political parties individually say that they are in favour of electoral reforms, but collectively all of them oppose all such efforts. Two, while saying that x,y,z should be done, they are not willing to do it in their own parties. Three, political parties (or groupings of political parties) disagree among themselves on almost everything, but all parties become unanimous as soon as the question of electoral reforms comes up.

The only possible charitable explanation is that political parties do realise the need for reforms to the electoral and political systems but they seem to be unsure of what such changes will do to them. This is the well-known ‘fear of the unknown’. It is time the entire political establishment realised that (a) the existing state of affairs cannot continue indefinitely, and (b) if they can show some courage and initiate some changes in the larger national interest, two things are likely to happen.  One, they will earn public goodwill, and two, they may be able to get away with less drastic changes.

Let’s take the two proposals, of fast-track courts and lifetime ban, mooted by the Supreme Court. While these undoubtedly are good, some issues have been raised. Given that there are 1,581 cases involving MPs/MLAs which are currently pending, is the effort and expenditure on setting up special courts justified? Also, is the lifetime ban not too harsh?

A simpler, and arguably, more effective step could be to ban all persons from contesting elections who have criminal cases pending against them, but with three safeguards against misuse. Only those cases should be considered in which (a) punishment is two (or three, or five) years or more, (b) the case has been registered at least six months before the announcement of elections, and (c) charges have been framed by a court of law. These are the safeguards that the Supreme Court had specified in 2002 but which have been forgotten in the din.

The net impact of the above action on cleaning up the legislature and politics of the influence of criminalisation, taking the effort and expenditure required, will possibly be greater than what has been mooted in the Supreme Court. But, and this is a big but, this has to be done by the Parliament, in effect, by all the political parties acting together and the chances of that happening seem to be non-existent.

So, let us celebrate the proposals initiated by the Supreme Court and hope that they are put into real effect very soon.

The author is a former Professor, Dean, and Director In-charge of Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. Views are personal.