Earlier this month when The Times of India (a sister publication of this paper) reported how Question Hour had to be abandoned because MPs were found AWOL when the time came, ordinary citizens wrung their hands and bemoaned (yet again!) the sham that Parliament has become.
Did I say all? Let me correct that. All save our Parliamentarians themselves! Just a week after the TOI report, it was the turn of Rajya Sabha members to do an encore!
'Is there a virus around,' a plainly irritated Rajya Sabha chairman, Hamid Ansari, was heard asking last Tuesday when MPs against whose names the first six questions had been listed were found missing.
Faced with the perennial problem of missing MPs, the Upper House is reportedly considering a change in the rules under which questions will not lapse if an MP is not present when his question comes up. Instead some other member can raise it.
But this is only a partial solution. Stand-in questioner-MPs may not have any interest in the subject and are unlikely to have done any homework on the issue. As a result he/she will not be able to grill the minister and will have to rest content with whatever the government chooses to feed him by way of reply, defeating the very purpose of Question Hour.
Worse, the remedy does not address the basic issue: how can we ensure more effective functioning of Parliament?
It is in this background that the poser, 'Who's the Boss: Executive or Legislature?' at the recent conference hosted in the capital by the NGO, PRS Legislative Research seemed timely, albeit a bit ironic.
If our MPs are so unwilling to even attend Parliament, what hope in hell is there that they will fulfil the primary responsibility envisaged in the Constitution: keeping a watch on the executive? In which case there's really no debate on who's the boss. It is clearly the executive, as Asaduddin Owaisi, the plain-spoken MP from the AIMIM (All India Majlis e Ittehadul Muslimeen) Party put it very bluntly.
But is that a desirable state of affairs? Should we allow this de-facto state of affairs to become de-jure or should we as citizens do something about it? Remember, the separation of powers envisaged in our Constitution does not give any of the three branches – the executive, the legislature and the judiciary – an edge over the other. On the contrary, there are checks and balances so that no one branch is allowed unfettered freedom.
