Parties in the country have been using the numbers in Rajya Sabha to embarrass a Government which is in a minority in the Upper House, and derail governance. Joint sittings then become necessary

The Narendra Modi Government, it appears, had no option but to take the extraordinary step of proroguing the Rajya Sabha in order to re-promulgate the Ordinance to keep alive the law pertaining to land acquisition, because of one of the great ironies of national politics over the last quarter of a century. Ever since the Rajiv Gandhi Government bowed out of office in 1989, no party or coalition which has been voted to power at the Centre has enjoyed a clear majority throughout its tenure in the Upper House of Parliament. As a result, there is invariably a disjunction between the ‘popular mandate’ obtained by a party or coalition in a lok Sabha election and the harsh reality that it faces in the Rajya Sabha.

The first thing that hits a new Government is the fact that it commands a majority only in one wing of Parliament and that it is at the mercy of its opponents in the Upper House. Faced with this reality, Governments devise many ways to overcome this infirmity. Some try to leverage the cases being pursued by the Central Bureau of Investigation against political opponents to buy support of a political leader and his or her party in the Rajya Sabha. This has been the standard trick adopted by many Governments and is often done on an ad hoc, session by session and case by case basis.

Although it is not easy to withdraw a prosecution, the criminal justice system is so slow and tangled that it is rather easy for a Government to get the agency to drag a case on for a couple of years. When this happens, the opposition party which gets the relief reciprocates the gesture by supporting legislative measures moved by the Government or by abstaining when a vote is taken in order to ensure that the government has its way in the House.

Sometimes, if the Government can influence the investigators and prosecutors to such an extent as to provide substantial or permanent relief to the beleaguered leader, the offer of support can be for the entire tenure of the Government. The Government of the day has a couple of other tricks up its sleeve in order to get the support of an opposing party in the other House, and this includes allowing a party leader to retain a sprawling bungalow in lutyens’ Delhi, even though he has lost his entitlement to it; ensuring the continuance in key Government positions of some officials related to a leader; and getting the Income Tax Department or the Enforcement Directorate to go slow on some cases in which a leader has an interest or is directly involved.

When all this fails, the Government uses the final Brahmastra — to convene a joint sitting of the two Houses of Parliament to have a legislative measure passed. The prorogation of the Rajya Sabha is the first step in that direction, so that an Ordinance can be re-issued, and this too has been resorted to by Governments in the past. The predicament of the Modi Government is nothing new. Every Government over the last quarter of a century has had to cope with its minority status in the Upper House when it enters office and keep up an array of tricks to overcome this hurdle and make law as it deems fit. Side by side, every Government begins the exercise of improving its own numbers in the Rajya Sabha after winning a lok Sabha election. This is done by ordering or engineering early elections to Assemblies in States where it has done well in the lok Sabha poll. Often, this gamble pays off and the party wins a majority in the State as well. Since MlAs constitute the electoral college for the election of Rajya Sabha members from each State, the party’s strength in the Upper house begins to rise.

So, if the party is really lucky and enjoys wide public support across large parts of the country, it can obtain a majority in the Upper House over a four-to-six year period and also return to power in the next lok Sabha election. In such a scenario, the party will enjoy a majority in both Houses during its second term in office. But this is a tall order. A look at the electoral history tells us that this is a Sisyphean task that is bound to fail. Invariably, the party in power at the federal level begins to face the anti-incumbency heat as it enters the fourth year and is often voted out in the next lok Sabha poll, even though its numbers may have improved in the Rajya Sabha by then. Alternately, it fails to garner support in State Assembly elections as it did in the lok Sabha poll. In the first scenario, the party gains a majority or near-majority status in the Rajya Sabha, but is trounced in the lok Sabha election. The winner then becomes the next victim of the Sisyphus Syndrome and begins to build up its strength in the Rajya Sabha.

The emergence of dozens of regional and caste-based parties in the States over the last three decades and the shrinking base of national parties has contributed substantially to this lack of correlation in the strength of the party in power in the two Houses of Parliament. The founding fathers did not visualise such a problem because the Constitution was drafted at the time when the Congress enjoyed a virtual monopoly at the Central level and in the States. That was the era of a dominant party in power and a few smaller parties as the Opposition. All that has changed now, and impatient electorates in the States have been shifting their loyalties so often that the political complexion of the two Houses is never the same.

It fact, it has become a study in contrast. This presents a major problem when it comes to governance, because the main Opposition is out to stymie the ruling party’s agenda and thereby signal non-governance and administrative failure. This does not augur well for governance. Nor does it make constitutional sense to allow a churlish Opposition, which has been defeated by the people in a parliamentary election, to defeat the people’s will through such petty manoeuvres. This has gone on for a quarter of a century and, therefore, the time has come to break this vicious cycle. Meanwhile, we need to remember that the very Constitution that allows the Opposition to play these games, authorises the prorogation of the Upper House and joint sittings of the two Houses to break the logjam.