Lawmakers in Sweden have no official cars, enjoy no immunity, use public transport and wash their own clothes or in public laundries. Sweden, therefore, has blossomed from an impoverished agro economy to an enviable industrial power, a socially-just and one of the few least-corrupt countries. In contrast, Nigeria, a perpetually developing country, infamous as incorrigibly corrupt, is actually a poor state where lawmakers get special treatment, luxury official vehicles with huge running costs apart from vulgarly hefty salaries. It is also true that most countries, where election-crazy politicians are paid big salaries and perks, are horrifically poor with people living in incurable distress.
The Swedish Speaker also travels in crowded buses and trains. Only the Prime Minister has the right to use an official car, which he or she hardly exercises. The top lawmaking politicians are treated as ordinary citizens because the former is considered the servant. An MP in Sweden earns $78,000 a year which though looking big is only about two times more than that of an elementary school teacher in the country, nearly the same as a suburban lower primary school in Odisha. The formally corrupt Nigerian senator gets double the annual salary of a Swedish MP as only running cost or incidental expenses in two months. The salary amount is mindboggling. In addition, a Nigerian top lawmaker has official cars, furniture allowances, hardship allowances, welcome package, severance package and many more allowances.
Indian political creatures in power also enjoy similar daylight-robbed public money or assets, which are kept almost hidden as they are not easily available in public domains.
Once when President Emmanuel Macron of France visited Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven in 2017, both men and their officials merrily used a public bus for one of their trips. Official cars or private drivers for top politicians are a rare sight in Sweden. Ministers and MPs are expected to travel in crowded buses and trains. More interestingly, no political biggie absolutely has parliamentary immunity. They are to be tried in a court of law like any other person down the street. They do not even have private secretaries to help them, reprographic help or menials to run errands unlike political numbskulls posing as bosses in India.
Of late, there has been quite some hue and cry over pension and perks given to former Indian lawmakers mainly because they keep making laws shamelessly to benefit themselves. Every literate Indian knows by now how unscrupulously LAD funds are siphoned through make-believe public projects.
A May 2019 article by Claudia Wallin published in the Mail & Guardian makes clear how Swedish lawmakers, members of the executive and the judiciary are treated publicly:
Sweden does not offer luxury or privileges to its politicians. Without official cars or private drivers, Swedish ministers and MPs travel in crowded buses and trains, just like the citizens they represent. Without any right to parliamentary immunity, they can be tried in a court of law like any other person. With no private secretaries at the door, their bare-bones parliamentary offices are as small as 8 metre square. Politicians who dare to spend public money on taxi journeys, instead of riding the train, end up on news headlines. Even the speaker of Parliament receives a card to use the public transportation. The ordinary Swedish citizen too is conscious of the citizen’s rights as well duties. “I’m the one who pays the politicians,” says one Joakim Holm, an ordinary Swedish citizen. “And I see no reason to give them a life of luxury.”
Swedish parliamentarians live in tiny apartments in the capital, where they wash and iron their own clothes in communal laundries. This may seem meagre for such eminent people, but it actually is much better than it used to be. Uptil the end of the 1980s, all parliamentarians slept on sofa beds in their own offices. No Swedish in public life earns a multi-digit salary which is considered obscene and vulgar. At the municipal level, any desire to work in politics means working without salary. Swedish councillors neither earn a salary nor do they have the right to an office. They work from home.
Sweden’s experience subverts the unhinged concept that politicians should be accorded reverential treatment worthy of a higher caste, consisting of ladies and gentlemen who are more illustrious than the average citizen and therefore deserving of an almost divine right to benefits and privileges that those living below the political Olympus could never attain.Sweden is a nation that treats its government officials and political representatives as ordinary citizens. Formal titles of addresses have been abolished since the 1960s, and where everyone is called simply ‘you’ and not ‘Sir’ or ‘Your Excellency’ or ‘Your Honour’. The Swedish Ministers including the PM pushing shopping trolleys in supermarkets of Stockholm is common public sight. The Stockholm Mayor is often seen standing in a queue at a bus-stop. Not surprisingly, Sweden is undoubtedly a safer and less violent country than India, where politicians and wealthy citizens alike do not travel in bulletproof cars. One who remains in touch with the day-to-day realities and pains of citizens, get elected as a revered politician. And most significantly, political power has to be exercised only within the boundaries of decency. Even the judges of courts have no right to official cars, private secretaries or perks. Anyone in authority must be held accountable, and all information about personal issues that affect the life of the common folks has to be made freely available to the public.
In India, crazy things are happening to the people only because the majority of the politicians in power have brains that function only for grabbing public wealth and power and goes dead when expected to make slightest sacrifices to ensure minimum relief for the distressed folks.
Ordinary, illiterate crooks, having become law makers mostly by fluke or guile, have chosen to masquerade themselves as larger-than-life animals so as to keep ordinary street people intimidated.
Odisha is not so very different either. Fortunately, Naveen Patnaik has kept most loudmouth, unethical, frighteningly corrupt elected politicians chained like tame dogs all this while to make sure ordinary people do not fall prey to sinister designs of the political rascals easily.
The latest demand by the Odisha lawmakers to have their salary and perks, etcetera, raised must be turned down with a whip. They must be asked to read the Sweden story in this column at least once.