The Parliamentary System: What we have made of it, What we can make of it, Arun Shourie, ASA/Rupa, Rs 495

What do you call this book, Arun Shourie's fourth in the two years since he ceased to be a Minister following the 2004 Lok Sabha election? Is it a book written in anger, in hurt, by a wounded constitutionalist shattered at what politics has done to his beloved republic? Is it the liberal's last lament, his last sigh as he turns one final time for a gaze at that Shining City his generation inherited, now a distant mirage, almost, taken by the barbarians who knocked down the gate?

Is it a cry from the heart, a document of remembrance from somebody who came of age during the Emergency and probably sees that cataclysmic event as the trenchant divide between an old, idealistic, idealised, ideational public life, and the "pragmatic" and "practical" politics that now dominates our discourse?

Perhaps not one of those definitions is absolutely accurate, for they all appear decidedly grim. It is, alas, a liberal's lot to remain the eternal optimist, much as he wants to hide it, much as he wants to articulate and report the fears, perturbations and angularities of his environment. To read Arun Shourie is to feel disheartened; to read Arun Shourie is also to hope.

The books begins with a ruthless analysis of the electoral framework - the "Parliamentary System" referred to in the title - and how it encourages and, indeed, increasingly survives on an incessant fragmentation of the vote. This has made India perhaps more democratic: District-level, caste-based parties, as the author writes, can determine the result of elections in Tamil Nadu, backing either the DMK or the AIADMK; therefore, depending on which coalition Jayalalitha Jayaram or M Karunanidhi join, the district party can, in effect, decide the future Government of India.

Free-flowing to the point of anarchic as such democracy is, it makes for impossible governance. Nobody has a mandate, everybody has a veto - the voter is both the villain and the supposed protagonist of this drama. Shourie calls it the "cult of the 'common man'" - "The linear ascent: 'The people are sovereign; 'Therefore, the Parliament is sovereign'; 'Therefore, parliamentarians are sovereign; 'Therefore, the majority of parliamentarians are sovereign'; 'Therefore, the one who controls the majority of parliamentarians is sovereign'."

Shourie is not the first to draw a distinction between the mere fact that people vote and that a society is governed according to the will and for the greater good of the people. Two thousand years ago, Aristotle, in his six-fold classification of Government, distinguished between "polity" and "democracy" as, respectively, "good" and "bad" forms of the rule of the many.

Four years ago, in his engaging study of, primarily, the American socio-political template, The Future of Freedom, Fareed Zakaria spoke of democracy amounting to a meaningless if regular staple called voting, unless it were embellished by the garnishing of "republicanism", of institutions, regulatory bodies and - however we may term it - an intellectual aristocracy.

Shourie interrogates the phenomenon in the Indian context. He makes, essentially, five points.

One, the first-past-the-post system as it now stands is neither representative nor integrative. As his research tells him, sectional, identity-based popularity and a sense of voter fatigue allows candidates to win with sometimes even a fifth of support from electors.

To cite a random example, the MP from Pilibhit was chosen by 19.9 per cent of the eligible voters in 2004; the MP from Bansgaon won a bigger lottery, needing only 12.5 per cent. Even the Assembly election in Bihar in winter 2005, which led to a sweeping mandate for the NDA, saw every single winning MLA elected with less than 30 per cent of support from eligible voters.

Two, the unrepresentative nature of Parliament and Assemblies throws up fixers, deal-makers and, at an extreme, criminals as legislators. The composition of the legislature holds the executive to ransom; yet, paradoxically, the legislature fails as a monitoring body, and does not devote adequate time to deliberate on legislation or policy. In this regard, some of the author's own experiences in the Rajya Sabha are both amusing and, at a deeper level, saddening.

Three, the regression of the political leadership is taking place at a time when economic opportunities are throwing up business and entrepreneurial role models for young India. This discrepancy, Shourie predicts, cannot run till eternity. Either the "new India" will rebuild a polity in its own image; or short-sighted politics will force "new India" to pack its bags and migrate.

Four, Shourie does not believe in simply sitting back and allowing the game of chance to proceed. He argues that the judiciary, for all its faults, has kept the "basic structure" of the Constitution intact and has fought off, with varying degrees of success, subversion by the legislature. He pins his hopes on the Supreme Court as, literally, India's court of last appeal.

Five, in the unleashing of entrepreneurial energies and in the economic awakening of the middle class, Shourie senses hope. He doesn't quite say it but it would appear that he sees this as an analogue to the political mobilisation of the middle class in 1977, as the Emergency ended and Indira Gandhi was overthrown.

This was, to Shourie's generation, its moment of truth. It made apparent the revolutionary capacities of the citizen, as opposed to the voting habit of the elector. One suspects that this is why the Emergency and the parliamentary debates of the era - for entertainment, read Bhupesh Gupta of the CPI on pages 122-124, as he blames the Allahabad High Court judgement that unseated Indira Gandhi on BBC, the RSS, Anand Margis, "Western press, Western television, Western radio ... internal forces of reaction and the external forces of imperialism and neo-colonialism" - find such scrupulous mention in this book.

Shourie, the once and forever middle class hero, has not lost faith in his people. This book is his entreaty; could it become their manifesto?ld-timers in Delhi remember Navin Chawla as an affable sort of chap. A talented lad at St Columba's, son of an upstanding doctor couple, biographer of Mother Teresa, married to perhaps India's best art restorer, Rupika. With a CV like that, really, you can scarcely go wrong.

Courtesy: www.dailypioneer.com, May 27, 2007