A halfway house

With the exception of 9/11, American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and Princess Diana’s death, no live TV coverage has so fixated the viewers across the world, or at least in English-speaking countries, as the recent “firestorm” unleashed by the monstrous phone hacking by Rupert Murdoch’s mighty media empire.

A remarkable feature of the whole squalid episode was that though there were street demonstrations against the media mogul, and hatred for him was manifest, these were secondary. Primarily, it was Parliament that grasped the nettle. Prime Minister David Cameron was clearly vulnerable and this showed. For he had not only employed as his director of communication Andy Coulson, a tainted former editor of News of the World, but also attracted odium because of his proximity to Mr Murdoch and his trusted minions. The Opposition, led by Ed Miliband of the Labour Party, had found an opportunity to push the Prime Minister and the government to the wall. Yet, the parliamentary battle on the highly emotive event was fought, broadly though not entirely, with the necessary decorum. No less importantly, it was before a parliamentary committee, and not any other agency, that the most powerful media magnate in the world grovelled, calling it the “most humble day” of his life, though he passed on all blame to others.
In the House of Commons there was barracking only twice — first when Mr Cameron was defending himself spiritedly and later when Mr Miliband was targeting Mr Cameron for offering only “a half-apology”, not a full apology, for his “catastrophic error” of hiring Mr Coulson and “bringing him into the heart of the Downing Street”. On both occasions, the Speaker rose and told the members that each side must listen to the other without creating any disturbance. He was obeyed even as verbal slings and arrows continued to fly across the floor.
Indeed, there was no shouting and screaming even when Mr Cameron, while accepting that he had seen Mr Murdoch and his lieutenants quite often, added delicately: “(But) I can assure the House that I have never held a slumber party or seen Rebekah Brooks (the CEO of News Corp and a close confidante of Mr Murdoch) in her pyjamas.” (This clearly was a hit at his predecessor, Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown, whose wife had invited Ms Brooks to a “slumber party”.)
Riveted to all this I kept wondering whether honourable members of Indian Parliament were watching the vigorous two-hour session of questions and answers and, if so, were they drawing any lessons from it. Of course, another gnawing thought in my mind was that the Indian media, both print and electronic, is no less crass, craven and compromised than its British counterpart. In fact, it is doubtful if media in any other country is tarred with the brush of such infamy as “paid news”. Therefore, it must also do soul searching.
That, however, will have to be discussed separately and later because, for the present, attention has to be focused on Parliament. It is not only the apex legislature of the country but also the centrepiece of institutions that underpin democracy. The bitter truth is that the Indian Parliament has been debased, systematically, deliberately and persistently to a point where it is perilously close to its nadir.
What an irony it is that this was not always so. Since Independence until the end of the Nehru era, this country’s Parliament earned worldwide admiration. In the mid-1950s, Professor W. Morris-James of Britain wrote a book to say that though India’s Parliament seemed to be a “sounding box” of Nehru, it was also a “Grand National Assembly” where all national issues were discussed “fully and freely”. It should be, he added, a “role model” for the newly emerging nations of the Third World.
On a cold December evening in 1957, our Parliament proved the professor right. Feroze Gandhi, a Congress member and the son-in-law of the Prime Minister, in the course of a special debate demanded by him, had exposed devastatingly the Life Insurance Corporation’s questionable investments, totalling over a crore of rupees, in the dubious firms of an industrialist named Mundhra. Nehru’s response was to applaud the “majesty of Parliament” — how strange these words sound in the present context — and to appoint a commission of inquiry, headed by eminent Justice M.C. Chagla. The judicial report came within two months. As a result of it the then finance minister, T.T. Krishnamachari, had to resign and several distinguished civil servants such as H.M. Patel lost their jobs.
Sadly, the practice of stonewalling any demand for investigation into charges of corruption began in the time of Indira Gandhi, and, as a consequence, so did the pernicious practice of noisy disruption of parliamentary proceedings. On one occasion when Indira Gandhi refused to share with the Opposition the findings of the Central Bureau of Investigation, so tall a leader as Morarji Desai threatened to sit on a dharna inside the House indefinitely. She skilfully worked out a compromise, the like of which was witnessed again. The stonewalling pattern continued, deteriorated over time and has now acquired frighteningly destructive proportions. Over the last decade the almost daily disruption of Parliament on any pretext has become routine.
Let me assert that had Parliament been engaged, in recent months, in a full and unhindered discussion on egregious corruption, the source of nationwide anger, there might never have been the Anna Hazare fast at Jantar Mantar or the less savoury Ramdev drama.
Every single party is equally responsible for the lamentable situation. When in power, all parties, big and small, have one stand that they reverse immediately after losing power. Just look at the BJP’s contradictory approaches to corruption in Delhi and in Bengaluru! The result is the almost complete undermining of Parliament’s dignity, authority and efficacy. If this state of affairs goes on unchecked, something will have to give. Countless were the occasions when, from the Chair in the Lok Sabha, Somnath Chatterjee warned of exactly this. In India’s neighbourhood Parliaments have often been locked by the military. Must the elected “representatives of the people” themselves do so here?