Parliament’s loss, people’s loss

A Question of Checks & Balances

The President of India summoned Parliament on September 1 for its monsoon session from September 14, thereby not allowing for the Question Hour of Parliament, which requires a 15-day notice for the questions to be asked. While the measure has been taken citing the Covid-19 pandemic, several questions have been raised on its implications for parliamentary democracy and the system of checks and balances within the Indian Constitution.

Question Hour is the time during which parliamentarians can ask the ministers of the government questions to hold them accountable. Questions can be on any aspect of the functioning or plan of a ministry, except secret matters or matters that are sub-judice.

Generally, the allotted time for Question Hour used to be 11 am–12 noon, which was changed in 2014 to 12 noon–1 pm for the Rajya Sabha to avoid disruptions. Three types of questions can be asked – starred, unstarred and short-notice questions. A starred question is asked by an MP and responded to verbally by the minister concerned. These questions have to be submitted 15 days in advance and only 15 starred questions, picked through ballot, are answered. Two supplementary questions can be asked on a question, subject to the discretion of the Speaker/Chairman, by three more MPs. An unstarred question receives a written reply from the ministry concerned and it too has to be submitted 15 days in advance. Short-notice questions are questions of urgent public importance and do not require a 15-day notice. These are admitted at the discretion of the Speaker/Chairman. It is noteworthy that in the last three years, only 10 short-notice questions have been asked in the Rajya Sabha.

While Question Hour seems simple, its importance cannot be emphasised enough. It has major political ramifications. The Mundhra Scandal, India’s first major financial scam, was revealed during Question Hour in 1957 and led to the resignation of the then finance minister and shook the Nehru government. Question Hour holds one of the keys to parliamentary democracy in the country and has often led to the formation of commissions, parliamentary enquiries or enactment of new legislation. Question Hour also helps the government to gauge the mood of the nation through the MPs, who are representatives of the people.

Checks and Balances

The Constitution envisages a system of checks and balances for better administration of our democracy. In this regard, a check on the executive is considered the most important aspect of our parliamentary democracy. The typical executive, comprising the bureaucracy, is checked by the political executive, who we typically understand as the government or the elected representatives. The political executive has a dual role – it forms part of the executive as well as that of the legislature. The legislature, in the present case Parliament, through its various in-house mechanisms, is empowered to keep a check on the political executive who, in turn, checks the bureaucracy.

In the absence of Question Hour, the government can come to Parliament and pass any Bill and there will be no mechanism to hold the government accountable by focusing public attention on issues of legislation and governance through MPs’ questions. This undermines the principles of parliamentary democracy, which is held to be a part of the basic structure of the Constitution by the Supreme Court in the monumental case of Keshavananda Bharti vs State of Kerala.

A check on the government also assumes significance during this Covid-19 pandemic, which has witnessed a higher degree of executive control over the State and on our lives than in normal times. Under the National Disaster Management Act, 2005, the central government has been issuing instructions to the states and supervising affairs. There has also been a lot of questions on how the central government has been handling the pandemic, especially given the migrant labourers’ crisis and the shrinking economy. It is important to prevent the executive from acting with impunity. Question Hour would have served as an effective check and highlighted these aspects in detail to general public and also Parliament’s power to hold the central government collectively responsible and accountable to it. Under the system of collective responsibility, the central government is collectively responsible to Parliament for all the actions it undertakes.

Thus, doing away with Question Hour reduces a significant level of checks – the constitutionally envisaged check of the Parliament and of general public pressure on the executive – which are necessary for a healthy democracy. In such a scenario, the judiciary is the only check mechanism, but the judiciary is also bound by the principle of separation of powers and some checks can be performed only by Parliament. One such role is ensuring the system of parliamentary checks, which can only be done by Parliament and by no other institution of our democracy. On the first day of the monsoon session, it was revealed by the government that it has no data on the deaths of migrant workers who were subjected to immense difficulties for months by the government’s own decision-making during the pandemic and millions of whom chose to walk hundreds of miles back home to their villages. That the government had no data on this matter was not in the public domain before the start of the parliamentary session, and it would not have come to light but for it. This is illustrative of the checking role that the Parliament performs. Had there been the usual Question Hour, it would have proved more revealing to the public on how the executive is functioning.

While Covid-19 has forced people, institutions and governments to innovate and adapt to new ways of doing things, it is essential that some much cherished principles, more so of something as foundational as parliamentary democracy, be preserved and treated as non-negotiable. Such a situation makes the role of MPs to keep a check on the government even more important than before. In fact, the present situation calls for a greater participation of the legislature in matters of governance so as to mitigate the executive’s shortcomings, rather than the weakening of the processes of checks and balances that we are seeing now.

(The writer is a student at the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru)