The Lok Sabha will meet on Monday, after the weekend break, but there is no guarantee that there will be much business transacted. Since Parliament reconvened on March 5, after the Budget Session recess, the proceedings of the Lok Sabha were washed for the tenth consecutive day on Friday, as opposition parties resorted to incessant protests and sloganeering over various issues, prime among them being the banking scam and the special status for Andhra Pradesh, the latter by parties from that State, and an issue over which the Telugu Desam Party quit the NDA earlier in the month.
The noisy scenes had led to a wide array of issues that need to be debated in the Houses of Parliament not being taken up. The banking scam that grabbed newspaper headlines and television prime time is just one of them, while State specific issues of special package to Andhra Pradesh and Cauvery river water sharing, are also up for discussion. Ironically these were the very issues on which the MPs were protesting, instead of debating.
With proceedings in the Lok Sabha stalled, the no-confidence motion against the NDA government moved by the YSR Congress and TDP, the first such motion since the government took office in May 2014, was not taken up on Friday. The disruption of proceedings even led to the Lok Sabha passing the Finance Bill and Appropriation Bills without any discussion in the week gone by. The disruption of proceedings has not been confined to the Lok Sabha, but has also spread to the Rajya Sabha, leading to Vice President and the Upper House Chairman, Venkaiah Naidu, as per reports, stating, “We are meeting, greeting and not doing anything.”
Parliament cannot be allowed to become a place of ‘meeting, greeting and not doing anything’. There is serious business that has to be conducted within the House. The MPs have been elected to legislate, to lead the nation, through constructive debate and interventions in Parliament, rather than noisy disruptions that don’t allow business to be conducted. Walkouts from the House as a means of protest are known, but continuous disruption only leads to delays in the transaction of business and is not desirable to the democratic process or parliamentary procedure.
A study conducted by Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy on disruptions in Parliament that analysed various sessions, found that statistics exposed the ‘diminishing importance of legislative business in Parliament’ as a number of hours have been lost to disruptions. The study looked at the winter session of 2013-14 in the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha and found that the number of productive hours for that session in the lower House were 19.7, while those lost were 90.3. Similarly in the upper House, the productive hours were 32.8, while those lost to disruption were 72.7. In contrast, the same study found that in the monsoon session of 2015, the Lok Sabha had 53 productive hours, losing 34.6 to disruptions, while the Rajya Sabha saw just 9.01 hours of business, losing 72.2 hours to disruptions.
Disruptions of proceedings do not serve any purpose. Parliament is the Nation’s top law-making body and it is the Opposition’s duty to hold the government accountable for its actions, and to ensure that bills brought in by the government are not hurriedly passed without a proper debate, and yet we’ve just had the Finance Bill go through without debate, a event that is very rare. A reasonable amount of time needs to be spent in the House debating issues, so that Parliament’s productivity increases and the Opposition plays a constructive role in the House.
