A Clumsy Way To Suicide

There are many reasons why India is a second-rate country. But one that far outweighs all the others in importance is the self-loathing of the Indian intelligentsia. Century after century of subjugation, to wave after wave of invaders, has so deeply impressed in us our own worthlessness that we find it impossible to believe in our ability to excel. That is the only possible explanation for the Atal Behari Vajpayee government's willingness to tinker with, and endanger, one of the 20th century's most colossal achievements - the welding of a billion people into a single stable, and by-and-large harmonious democracy. This is what his promise - via the President's inaugural address to Parliament, to fix the term of Parliament to the five-year maximum stipulated in the Constitution - threatens to do.

When this promise was included in the nda's manifesto, some of us shrugged our shoulders and ignored it. But the nda has come romping back to power and unfortunately, this is not one of the promises that Vajpayee forgot. So suddenly, at the very moment when India is completing the monumental transition from an immature, dominant-party democracy to a mature, bipolar democracy, it is confronted with a threat to the very existence of not only its democracy but its nationhood.

Make no mistake. If Parliament passes such a bill, India's nation-building project will fail and the country will disintegrate into chaos and bloodshed. The threat is acute as such a bill has only to be introduced for it to pass. All that every MP will see in it is a reprieve from never knowing when they will have to fight the elections all over again. Not one of them will pause to think of what this single change will do to the delicate system of checks and balances that has made Indian democracy one of the few success stories in the strife-ridden world of today.

Yet it doesn't take much understanding of Indian democracy to see what fixing the term of Parliament would do. The cabinet system of government we inherited from the British combines great executive power with stability. It does this partly because the simple-majority voting system simplifies the task of gaining an absolute majority of seats by magnifying the largest party or coalition's share of the seats and partly by making the life of the legislature co-terminus with the life of the government. As was noted by the late Sir Ivor Jennings in his classic work on cabinet government, the latter gives the prime minister a powerful weapon for maintaining discipline by threatening to resign or recommend the dissolution of Parliament when faced with the threat of defection.

Indian parties have always chafed at this restraint and have found many ways to limit the PM's right to recommend a dissolution. But the fact that no Parliament or legislature has survived the fall of a government by more than a few months has exerted its own discipline upon them. This is why Vajpayee's first nda stayed in office for 14 months before Jayalalitha's bruised ego finally got the better of her.

If the Parliament's tenure is fixed, this restraint will vanish. Defection will lose attendant penalties. On the contrary, if the experience of the Aya Rams and Gaya Rams of Haryana in '67 and of every state government thereafter is anything to go by, defection will become a highly profitable business. The executive will be severely weakened and, in a Parliament where 35 per cent of the seats have been won by parties that have a base in only one state, the power of the Central government to impose its will on the states will evaporate.

Only two remedies will remain and neither will work. The first will be to fix the term of the government and also make its life independent of its majority in Parliament. This would take our democracy in the direction of the US presidential system. Those who secretly hanker to emulate the US may welcome this but they'd do well to remember that the American system leads most of the time not to decisive government but to gridlock - control of the presidency and Congress by opposed parties - and a near-complete paralysis in domestic legislation except on issues where the President is able to garner bipartisan support. In India, the gridlock will be worse because unlike the US President, the prime minister will not have a personal mandate from the people, obtained in a separate election. The only silver lining will be that in India, buying bipartisan support will be a lot cheaper than it is in the US - money alone will suffice.

The alternative is to keep the life of the government dependent upon its majority in Parliament. But this will lead India directly to the French Fourth Republic, which gave France a succession of governments with an average life of nine months and was totally unable to come to grips with hard but necessary decisions like the decolonisation of Algeria and sub-Saharan Africa. Whichever road India takes, the balance between the executive and that of the legislature will tilt sharply away from the former.

This is only half the story. Since there are far fewer political parties in each state than there are at the national level, the state governments will remain far more cohesive than the Centre. The Centre-state balance of power will therefore shift rapidly in their favour. Worse still, if the life of only the Lok Sabha is fixed, then the collapse of executive power will take place only at the Centre. And the balance of power between the Centre and the states will tilt all the way towards the latter. Once that happens, the disintegration of India will only be a matter of time. History tells us that past Indian empires, from the Mauryas to the British, collapsed not because a part of it tore itself free but because the core rotted away, leaving the parts to fend for themselves. The first post-Independence democratic empire could go the same way.