Author: Editorial
Publication: The Indian Express
Date: April 30, 2011
URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/a-vote-too-many/783701/0
For weeks it had been clear that the Public
Accounts Committee was headed for a fracas - especially after Congress and
DMK members took up their party line that once a joint parliamentary committee
on telecom had been constituted, the PAC should desist from inquiring into
2G spectrum allocation. The argument was, and remains, flimsy. Yet, no one
could have expected the meeting called to take a final view on the draft to
collapse so fast into such unprecedented mayhem. After UPA MPs tried to force
a vote, a move resisted by opposition MPs, PAC chairman M.M. Joshi adjourned
the meet. But the UPA MPs - who with support from a BSP and an SP MP, held
a 11-10 majority on the committee - stayed on and elected themselves a new
chairman, Saifuddin Soz, and rejected the report. This is a tactic of such
breathtaking recklessness that the UPA should consider what it implies for
the committee system in Parliament and for the immediate need to bring a working
civility to Parliament.
The PAC is a committee of long lineage, and
after Independence it has been incrementally strengthened as a watchdog on
the government's finances. Early on ministers were kept out of the committee,
and by the mid-1960s a convention was adopted of appointing an opposition
MP as chairperson. It is a convention that's mostly worked well, and it has
served as a mechanism to nurture working relations between government and
opposition so critical in a parliamentary democracy. This is why the UPA's
ploy of forcing a vote is so reckless - it threatens to wreck the consultative
and give-and-take mechanisms between treasury and opposition benches that
steel the legislature into the sum of more than the ruling party/ coalition's
numbers. Certainly, the current stand-off draws from the politically charged
2G context. And Joshi, as committee chair, could have done more to prepare
the members for a more deliberative paragraph-by-paragraph reading of the
draft, especially the contentious portions relating to the prime minister.
He should have seen the polarised my-truth-versus-yours political environment
and refrained from making his press conferences such a performance.
Of course, Joshi's job was not made any easier
by the Congress's obstructionism. And ultimately, the PAC - by extension,
Parliament itself - has been let down by the UPA. Forcing a vote - using brute
numbers to overturn convention - is not always the most democratic thing to
do.
