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Pep talk in Parliament
SEVANTI NINAN
Can we now expect decency and decorum?
WHOSE fault is it if the citizens of this country are increasingly disenchanted with the performance of the men and women they elect to parliament and to the leglislatures?
And if they believe that the latter don't do very much other than shout each other down and disrupt proceedings long enough to have the house adjourned, day after day? Is the fault of the reporters and TV cameras which report little else, or of the honourable members who create the ruckus in the first place? Do the latter stand up and make a spectacle of themselves because the TV cameras are there to give them 20 seconds of fame? Or does a mentally lazy media stop at covering disruption and disorder because its sense of news is warped?
The honourable Speaker of Parliament convened a special session last Sunday to strategise on bringing back discipline and decorum to Parliament and the legislatures. A solemn occasion, in the course of which the Vice-President, the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition, chief ministers and cabinet ministers sat through a three hour speech-making session that was telecast live on DD News. What is of interest to this column is how many of the speakers thought the media was responsible for the decline in the image of parliamentarians in the eyes of ordinary people. The Prime Minister orated, pauses intact. He said nothing about the media. But the Vice-President, Sonia Gandhi, minister for parliamentary affairs Pramod Mahajan, and Faroukh Abdullah, Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir said quite a lot. Said Mr. Krishan Kant, "It was believed that the telecasting of Parliamentary and legislative proceedings would lead to improvements in the behaviour of the members. It would now appear that far from good conduct, telecasting seems to have promoted a tendency to dramatic acts." He added, "Five minutes of disturbance may earn you immortality in the next morning's newspapers, while an hour long learned peroration might not earn you even a single line."
Sonia Gandhi said practical ways would have to be found to project to the general public the more serious face of Parliament. "As disruption of order is the basis of newsworthiness it is inevitable that when the house is thrown into disarray it receives more media attention than when it is going about its usual business in the usual way. We have to devise ways in which the general public is able to access proceedings in the house when serious matters are seriously and purposefully discussed."
Pramod Mahajan Minister for Parliamentary Affairs said that if the media was inclined to print positive things, there would be more positive behaviour. "If paper tearing is reported but paper reading is not, then people will seize every opportunity to tear." Adjournments are newsworthy, he said, the papers love to report time loss. But the fact is there was no time loss in the 13th Lok Sabha. The time lost was gained by extra sittings, when the house sits late into the night to finish business, but this did not make headlines.
One of the pithiest speeches on the occasion was made by the Speaker of the West Bengal Assembly who said part of the problem lay with the kind of people who get elected. When political parties are deciding to whom to give tickets, their criteria is whether those men and women would be able to win votes, not whether they will make good parliamentarians. The latter, he suggested , required voluntary submission to certain norms. "Political parties want numbers, not parliamentarians." He made an interesting point about whether getting the attention of the press actually helped the legislator. Whereas members often created a ruckus so that the press would project them and their constituencies would think they were being energetic legislators, the record showed that habitual trouble makers in the house did not get re-elected, he said.
At a conference in New Delhi some time ago the Commonwealth Parliamentary Union drew up a list of pointers on what Parliament and parliamentarians can do to improve the situation. One excellent suggestion made was that Parliament could facilitate more coverage of its serious business by opening the proceedings of select and other committees to the media. Another was that parties should take steps to raise the standard of parliamentary debate by: striving to elect high-calibre candidates, enhancing research support, and encouraging a better awareness of what the media needs.
On what the media and journalists can do, the conference said they should assign to cover Parliament the most competent journalists available, to ensure that the broad range of often complex issues in Parliament is adequately covered. Expose the public more to the battle of ideas by providing balanced coverage of parliament and paying attention to views expressed by the Opposition and all MPs. It added that newspapers should ensure adequate coverage of what goes on in parliamentary committees.
The truth is, good intentions notwithstanding, how we conduct ourselves on this issue depends on which side of the divide we find ourselves. Arun Shourie, now hailed as one of the Government's most competent ministers, has been heard to say repeatedly on television, particularly during the fireworks over the disinvestment of Bharat Aluminium Company (BALCO), that the Opposition must not oppose, merely for the sake of opposing. When he was editor of the Indian Express in the 1980s, he thought rather differently and would tell us that the Opposition's job was to hammer the government, ably assisted by newspapers such as the one he edited. The government at that point was headed by Rajiv Gandhi. On one occasion, he came down upon me like a ton of bricks for reporting in uncomplimentary terms the Opposition's performance during a debate on Bofors. "Is this any time to criticise the Opposition?" He thundered as he is wont to do, without raising his voice. And suggested to a gathering where I was not present that I should be assigned to cover pigs. That brought a rather abrupt end to my short and not particularly illustrious career as a parliament reporter.
Catch Duggu, son of Guddu: on Star World tonight, in the second part of Simi Garewal's "Rendevous with Hirthik Roshan". Last week Papa, Mama, and son shared tender reminiscences with Auntie Simi. This week, Hrithik will go solo. As always, the one who is really fascinating to watch is Simi. She does more emoting as an interviewer than most actors do in the course of an entire film. At 8.30 p.m.
On BBC World today: "Nikosi's Story", the moving story of the 12-year-old-boy who became the face of AIDS in South Africa, and his mission to highlight the plight of the HIV stricken. At 5.40 p.m..
Next Saturday on Star Gold: Bimal Roy's classic, "Do Bigha Zamin". At 7 p.m..
E-mail the writer at sevantininan@vsnl.com
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