Parliament’s 2023 Winter Session will forever be marked by the infamous distinction of having witnessed a record number of MP (Member of Parliament) suspensions. After a dramatic security breach on 13 December, opposition MPs demanded that the Union Home Minister make a statement in the Lok Sabha and that it be discussed in both Houses.
While a high-level inquiry committee has reportedly been set up as a response, the Lok Sabha Speaker and the Prime Minister called for the issue to not be ‘politicised’. As disruptions continued by unsatisfied opposition MPs, the presiding officers of the two Houses took the extraordinary step of bringing about the suspensions of over 140 MPs (and counting), spread across a week.
As per the Lok Sabha Speaker, the suspensions were issued to “uphold the sanctity of the House.” And while these MPs have remained suspended, the Lok Sabha has carried on with its legislative business, passing the three new criminal bills as well as the Telecommunications bill.
By the Book
What is striking about these developments is that, despite their extreme consequences, they stem from a seemingly straightforward application of the relevant rules.
Article 118(1) of the Constitution provides that each House may make its own rules of procedure, and accordingly, the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha’s respective ‘Rules of Procedure and Conduct of Business’ give their presiding officers the power and discretion to initiate a motion to suspend MPs for ‘persistently and wilfully obstructing the business of the House’ (Lok Sabha Rule 374 and Rajya Sabha Rule 256).
The Lok Sabha rules go even further, enabling the Speaker to automatically suspend MPs without even requiring a motion to be passed if a ‘grave disorder [is] occasioned by a member coming into the well of the House’ or if the member is causing obstruction by ‘shouting slogans’ (Rule 374A, added in 2001).
It is undisputed that these facts did indeed transpire in Parliament this week, and as such, the Lok Sabha Speaker and Rajya Sabha Chairman acted within the black letter of the law. And yet, this does not mean that their actions were constitutionally or politically appropriate.
What Parliamentary Democracy Constitutionally Entails
For one, as Chakshu Roy points out, this only demonstrates the deficiencies in the procedural rules themselves. They appear to turn on the logic that, since Parliament is meant to represent the voice of the people and act in their name, any disruptions to its proceedings by individual MPs must be undemocratic and need to be penalised. But democracy—and certainly our system of constitutional democracy—is not about merely facilitating unobstructed majority decision-making. While the will of the majority provides the basis for conferring power, the Constitution subjects the exercise of this democratic power to various norms, operating within a wider system of checks and balances.
Westminster-style parliamentary systems have a tendency towards executive dominance, given that the government’s party enjoys the majority in Parliament. But in the UK and elsewhere, this tendency is tempered by conventions that require scrutiny of majority decisions in the legislature, marked by deliberation and collaboration. Taken together, this is what brings us to a fuller picture of the exercise of power in a constitutional democracy—not just the brute will of the majority, but a considered, transparent, and accountable system of decision-making.
Unlike a system of direct democracy or a presidential system, a representative parliamentary democracy requires executive power to be exercised through Parliament, where MPs of the ruling, as well as opposition parties, can express their views, concerns, and criticisms regarding governmental proposals. Moreover, unlike in the UK, the locus of sovereignty in India does not lie in Parliament, but rather in the Constitution. It is ultimately the Constitution that creates, confers, and conditions the power exercised by all constitutional bodies, including Parliament. When a Westminster-style Parliament is paired with a written Constitution, all its actions—including legislative output, governmental scrutiny, and internal regulation—need to conform to and advance constitutional principles.
Unfortunately, an extensively written Constitution can give rise to the lazy and dangerous assumption that everything unwritten is constitutionally permitted. An over-reliance on the bare text of the Constitution can result in its own animating spirit being undermined. As scholars such as Meenakshi Ramkumar, Aishwarya Singh, and Gautam Bhatia have highlighted, the Indian Constitution’s failure to provide explicit safeguards to opposition parties in Parliament weakens Parliament’s ability to function as a democratic chamber in its fuller constitutional sense.
Autocratic Legalism
There are many roads that lead a democracy to an autocracy. The constitutional scholar Kim Lane Scheppele has identified ‘autocratic legalism’ as one of them, which involves using legally permissible tools to undermine liberal democratic constitutionalism.
Using disciplinary rules to uphold Parliament’s ‘sanctity’ by denuding it of members that represent crores of Indians is another milestone on this road.
Parliament’s ‘sanctity’ exists only in its capacity to embody and advance the constitutional principle of representative, deliberative democracy. This principle is violated to a far greater degree by the mass suspension of MPs for disruption, than it is by their disruption itself.
When the government of the day does not accommodate the people’s representatives, parliamentary disruption may well be more democratic than its disciplined, frictionless functioning. Instead, this week, Parliament’s formal sanctity was upheld at the expense of its very spirit.
(Kevin James is an LL.M. Candidate at Harvard Law School and a J.N. Tata Scholar. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed are the author's own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)
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