It's time to rethink parliamentary system
By Shashi Tharoor
Weekly Column "Shashi on Sunday" in "The Times of India"
December 16, 2007

The recent political shenanigans in New Delhi have confirmed once again what some of us have been arguing for some time: that the parliamentary system we borrowed from the British has become, in Indian conditions, nothing but a recipe for governmental instability. And instability is precisely what India, with its critical economic and social challenges, cannot afford. We must have a system of government whose leaders can focus on governance rather on staying in power.

Once again there is talk of a new election sooner or later. But quite apart from the horrendous costs, can we, as a country, afford to keep expecting elections to provide miraculous results when we know that they are all but certain to produce inconclusive outcomes and more coalition governments? Isn’t it time we realised the problem is with the system itself?

Pluralist democracy is our greatest strength, but its current manner of operation is the source of our major weaknesses. India’s many challenges require political arrangements that permit decisive action, whereas ours increasingly promote drift and indecision. The parliamentary system has not only outlived its utility; it was from the start unsuited to Indian conditions and is primarily responsible for many of our principal political ills.

To suggest this is political sacrilege in New Delhi. None of the many politicians i have discussed this with are even willing to contemplate a change. The main reason for this is that they know how to work the present system and do not wish to alter the ways they are used to. But our reasons for choosing the British parliamentary system are themselves embedded in history.

Like the American revolutionaries of two centuries ago, Indian nationalists had fought for 'the rights of Englishmen', which they thought the replication of the Houses of Parliament would both epitomise and guarantee. When former British prime minister Clement Attlee suggested the US presidential system as a model to Indian leaders, "they rejected it with great emphasis. I had the feeling that they thought i was offering them margarine instead of butter."

Even our Communists have embraced the system with great delight, revelling in their adherence to British parliamentary convention (down to the desk-thumping form of applause) and complimenting themselves on their authenticity. One veteran Marxist legislator, Hiren Mukherjee, used to assert proudly that British prime minister Anthony Eden had felt more at home during Question Hour in the Indian parliament than in the Australian.

Yet, the parliamentary system assumes a number of conditions which simply do not exist in India. It requires the existence of clearly-defined political parties, each with a coherent set of policies and preferences that distinguish it from the next, whereas in India a party is merely a label of convenience which a politician adopts and discards as frequently as a Bollywood film star changes costume.

The principal parties, whether ‘national’ or otherwise, are fuzzily vague about their beliefs: every party’s ‘ideology’ is one variant or another of centrist populism, and with the sole exceptions of the BJP and the Communists, their separate existence is a result of electoral arithmetic or regional identities, not political conviction. (And even there, what on earth is the continuing case, after the demise of the Soviet Union, for two separate Communist parties?)

With few exceptions, India’s parties all profess their faith in the same set of rhetorical cliches, notably socialism, secularism, a mixed economy and non-alignment, terms they are all equally loath to define. No wonder, the Communists had no difficulty signing on to the ‘Common Minimum Programme’. (The BJP used to be thought of as an exception, but in its attempts to broaden its base of support it sounds - and behaves - more or less like the other parties, except on the emotive issue of national identity.)

So, our parties are not ideologically coherent, take few distinct positions and do not base themselves on political principles. As organisational entities, therefore, they are dispensable, and are indeed cheerfully dispensed with (or split/reformed/merged/dissolved) at the convenience of politicians. The sight of a leading figure from a major party leaving it to join another or start his own - which would send shock waves through the political system in other parliamentary democracies - is commonplace, even banal, in our country. (Ajit Singh, if memory serves, has switched parties nine times in the last 15 years.)

In the absence of a real party system, the voter chooses not between parties but between individuals, usually on the basis of their caste, their public image or other personal qualities. But since the individual is elected in order to be part of a majority that will form the government, party affiliations matter.

So, voters are told that if they want an Indira Gandhi as prime minister, or Karunanidhi as their chief minister, they must vote for someone else in order to indirectly accomplish that result. It is an absurdity only the British could have devised: to vote for a legislature not to legislate but in order to form the executive.

So much for theory. But the result of the profusion of small parties is that today we have a coalition government of 20 parties, some with just one or two members of parliament, which has succeeded an earlier coalition government of 23 parties. And, as we have just seen in the debacle over the Indo-US nuclear deal - which instead of being hailed as a major diplomatic triumph for India was stymied by the opposition of the Communists, without whose votes the government would fall - a small minority can hamstring the government. Under the current system, India’s democracy is condemned to be run by the lowest common denominator - hardly a recipe for decisive action.

The disrepute into which the political process has fallen in India, and the widespread cynicism about the motives of our politicians, can be traced directly to the workings of the parliamentary system. It is time for a change.