Double standards

It is a game at which politicians, especially those belonging to the Congress, are experts: when the law doesn't suit your personal requirements, change the thing, and principles be damned. So it comes as no surprise""frustration and anger are different""that the government should be thinking of issuing an Ordinance to ensure that its friends who hold what are called "offices of profit" under the government and are MPs as well, don't get turfed out in the way Jaya Bachchan did. When that action was taken, someone in the Election Commission doubtless thought that he would earn some brownie points. In the event, the move has backfired. For, if the law were applied equally to every MP who also holds an office of profit, many of the government's friends would have to be ejected from Parliament. Several MPs, including Karan Singh and Somnath Chatterjee, could be on their way out. Mr Chatterjee is the Chairman of the West Bengal Industrial Development Corporation and Mr Singh is the Chairman of the Indian Council of Cultural Relations. Having applied the rule to Ms Bachchan, who was chairman of the UP Film Board, a right-thinking government would have applied the same yardstick to all others. But that is not how things work. Unlike Robert Frost in his poem "Crossroads", the government has not chosen to "take the road less traveled by", that is, be moral and courageous. Instead, it wants to change the law by expanding the list of offices that qualify and for holding which an MP can't be expelled. Not just that, either; in a throwback to the way Indira Gandhi governed""her impatience with Parliament needs no further documentation""it wants to issue an Ordinance so that debate can be avoided.

The fact, however, is that the law on the subject may well need to be adapted to contemporary reality, and a debate on it is therefore very necessary. Its original intention was to ensure that legislators could act independently by making them free of any obligation to the government, under the principle of separation of the powers of the executive and the legislature. But this has always been a somewhat fanciful notion because a party whip can ensure that MPs don't act independently anyway. Office of profit or not, few MPs anywhere in the world vote against their government.

Going beyond the immediate situation and saving the seats of some important MPs, the problem arises that many chief ministers in states (and perhaps some prime ministers too) have thrown the crumbs of petty office to those whom they are unable or unwilling to have as cabinet colleagues; and the Indian state has so many arms and legs that some irrelevant office can always be found where a legislator can be made the chairman and given a house, car, mobile phone, personal assistant and maybe a notebook computer. The need for throwing such minor loaves around is all the greater now since a ceiling has been fixed on the size of a council of ministers. But the truth also is that the ceiling is cavernous enough to accommodate almost everyone, so there is no need to dilute the law. If anything, it should be tightened.

Meanwhile, the government needs to answer two questions: Whether the office of the chairperson of the National Advisory Council is an office of profit as defined in the law, and if it is not, why it is being included in the Ordinance.