This is the cure?

Arun Shourie never merely writes; he conducts an Inquisition. It is remarkable that after holding varied positions in and outside government and authoring a multitude of path-breaking books Shourie remains as passionate about his beliefs as he was 30 years ago. There is little that's beguiling or charming about his arguments. But it is the sheer marshalling of facts and logic that hits the intellect like an ironsmith's hammer, which shakes his readers into questioning the entire gamut of conventional reasoning.

Shourie's latest hard-hitter is no different from the plethora of his earlier works. That he won't genuflect before 'holy cows' was apparent from his masterly work on fatwas as well as the "politically incorrect" critique of BR Ambedkar. In The Parliamentary System he undertakes an equally relentless assault on the comfort zones of India's ruling oligarchies, arguing with vicious precision against the prevailing order, not merely suggesting but also demanding change.

Shourie establishes his case for reform systematically, starting from the unrepresentative character of the electoral process that vests power in the hands of people elected by less than 20 per cent of eligible voters, the degeneration of parliamentary practices he has experienced as a Member and finally, takes us down memory lane to the system's easy subversion at Indira Gandhi's hands during the Emergency. He powerfully contends that not only is the first-past-the-post system flawed, but also there are systems that produce significantly better results, such as the German direct-cum-list method of electoral representation. But his preferred option is a directly elected executive presidency.

But there are moments when Shourie's denunciation of the existing order appears somewhat elitist and armchair, the kind that usually dominates pre-dinner living room conversation in posh localities of metropolitan cities. While I share his frustration at the steady erosion in the quality of elected representatives and the consequent decline in the standards of debate even in the Rajya Sabha, I do not think that a highly complex electoral formula involving transferable votes will work. (Shourie approvingly points to the idea that voters could be asked to list their first, second and third choices and the second preference votes of the eliminated third contender could be added to the top two with reduced value to arrive at a 50 per cent mark.) His angst against the steady fracturing of the polity on caste and regional lines, the shrinking space for national parties, the stranglehold of minor regional players on the government of the day, the rise of nationally inconsequential persons like Deve Gowda, IK Gujral and even Manmohan Singh, can be shared. But his remedy would appear worse than the disease.

I must confess my surprise at the structuring of the book. Shourie begins at the end, that is, the current scenario and moves across time to the Emergency in a bid to demonstrate how effortlessly the system was massacred at the hands of men of straw under Indira Gandhi's iron fist. He thereafter goes on to critique the judiciary too for its inconsistencies, citing some eminently learned and readable judicial debates. I somehow felt that he had proffered the solution before delineating the crisis or even raising the questions first.

His narrative of parliamentary debates during the Emergency and the passage of the heinous 42nd Amendment is vintage Shourie. It's simply unputdownable, especially for those who lived through that Dark Age. The equation of sovereignty with the persona of an individual, in the name of the unfettered supremacy of a Parliament of which most Opposition members were behind bars, makes chilling reading.

In the final analysis, however, I feel that Indian democracy has moved way ahead of the circumstances that prevailed in 1975 enabling Mrs Gandhi (and later her younger son) to hijack the system and derail the assumptions of our Constitution makers. Further, Shourie places undue emphasis on the observations of the stillborn Committee for the Review of the Working of the Constitution, set up by the NDA regime. The Committee, in my opinion, catalogued a series of homilies without offering concrete alternatives. To his credit, Shourie himself pre-empts some of the likely criticism of his work, saying it's bound to be panned as "high-caste intolerance" and elitist.

I won't indulge in such labelling, especially because of his disarming conclusion quoting a 1911 speech by Gopal Krishna Gokhale: "We, of the present generation of India, can only hope to serve India by our failures. The men and women who will be privileged to serve her by their successes will come later...But whatever fate awaits our labours, one thing is clear. We shall be entitled to feel that we have done our duty, and where the call of duty is clear, it is better to labour and fail than not labour at all..."

Is Shourie, with a pen as powerful as a battering ram, a visionary or mere critic? History will judge.

The author is Editor, The Pioneer, and a Rajya Sabha MP

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THE PARLIAMENTARY SYSTEM
What we have made of it, what we can make of it

Arun Shourie
ASA/Rupa & Co
Price: Rs 495; Pages: 264