As Members of Parliament troop into brand-new chambers of Parliament on Tuesday for the unexpectedly-convened special session, one of the possibilities in their minds must be the prospects for disruption. That practice, sadly, is often par for the course in India’s Parliament, many of whose members (and not only in the Opposition) appear to believe that the best way to show the strength of their feelings is to disrupt the lawmaking rather than debate the law. Last session, the Opposition parties united to stall both Houses almost every single day. While that was extreme, there has not been a single session in recent years in which at least some days were not lost to deliberate disruption.
It was not always this way. Indian politicians were initially proud of the parliamentary system they had adopted upon Independence, patterned as it was on Britain’s Westminster model. India’s nationalists had been determined to enjoy the democracy their colonial rulers had long denied them, and had convinced themselves the British system was the best, precisely since they had been excluded from enjoying its benefits. When a future British Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, travelled to India as part of a constitutional commission and argued the merits of a presidential system over a parliamentary one, his Indian interlocutors reacted with horror. “It was as if,” Attlee recalled, “I had offered them margarine instead of butter.”
Many of India’s first generation of parliamentarians — several of whom had been educated in England and watched British parliamentary traditions with admiration — revelled in the authenticity of their ways. Indian MPs still thump their desks in approbation, rather than applauding by clapping their hands. When Bills are put to a vote, an affirmative call is still usually “aye”, rather than “yes” (though “hanh” is gaining ground on the Treasury benches these days). An Anglophile Communist MP, Professor Hirendranath Mukherjee, boasted in the 1950s that a visiting British Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, had commented to him that the Indian Parliament was in every respect like the British one. Even to a Communist, that was a compliment to be proud of.
