Dangers of excessive partisanship

Harish Khare
The Hindu, 5 March

The democratic experiment could come undone if our leaders refuse to understand that fairness and self-restraint are to be practised by all.

JUST OVER 10 days ago sane voices across the country were complimenting themselves for having frustrated the Congress Party in its efforts to play fast and loose with the Constitution and for having prevented it from unfairly dismissing the Samajwadi Party government in Uttar Pradesh. The principle at stake was that constitutional institutions and provisions were not to be misused for partisan purposes. Last week showed how short-lived such decent moments are.
Last Friday, it was the turn of the Samajwadi Party members to inflict another kind of institutional damage. Its members chose, as a matter of deliberate strategy, to stall proceedings in the two Houses of Parliament as the rest of the political parties watched helplessly. The Samajwadi Party MPs perhaps could not have cared less that Friday was private members' day, the weekly occasion when ordinary members get a chance to have their say. They wanted to make a politically partisan point, even if it meant total loss of parliamentary business.
The Samajwadi Party leadership was miffed with the Congress that the Supreme Court had ordered a preliminary probe by the Central Bureau of Investigation into Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mulayam Singh's assets. The Samajwadi Party MPs flaunted a compact disc (CD) purported to be a record of a conversation between the petitioner before the Supreme Court and a private television channel reporter. The S.P. alleges the "conversation" proves collusion on the part of the Congress leadership in the matter.
A year ago, the Supreme Court had passed a blanket order preventing news channels and other media outlets from airing or publishing excerpts from conversations illegally taped or recorded. That order saved the Samajwadi Party massive embarrassment as the capital was then being flooded with copies of various CDs purported to contain unsavoury conversations between the party's senior leaders and film-stars and fixers.
By its ruling of February 26, 2006, the Supreme Court spared the polity of a new low tactic; now the same tactic is deemed to be fair by the Samajwadi Party leaders to cast aspersions on the judiciary.
On Thursday last it was left to the Rajya Sabha chairman to chide the members not to hurl abuses at each other. Vice-President Bhairon Singh Shekhawat had to remind the members that by repeatedly abusing this or that member or party, they were belittling the House's prestige.
Earlier in the week, on Monday, Lalu Prasad was heckled throughout his Railway budget speech by the BJP-led Opposition. For the first 40 minutes the Opposition found the ruling benches taking the heckling in their stride. Then, the BJP floor managers changed tactics and began raising personalised slogans against the Congress president and her son.
The result: the Congress benches retaliated by raising slogans about the Leader of the Opposition and his family.
Both sides were losers; the personalised slogans raised neither L.K. Advani's stature nor Sonia Gandhi's. Those who encourage their fellow parliamentarians to raise personalised slogans can only invite retaliation in kind.
Last week's disruptions and manoeuvrings inside Parliament brought to the fore, once again, the creeping non-democratic impulses. Leaders and parties, cutting across the spectrum, show respect for the Constitution and its institutions only when a verdict or a ruling favours them. The President is deemed a fair-minded functionary as long as he seems to lend his ear to a political party's complaint; the Election Commission is applauded as neutral and objective by those who find its rulings and decisions favourable and as biased and partisan by those who have reason to be unhappy with a particular ruling. The same self-serving yardstick of evaluation is now being sought to be used vis-à-vis the Supreme Court. At the drop of a hat, all political parties are only too happy to demand a CBI probe against this or that State Government because the State police or vigilance department was not to be trusted to do an honest job. But at the Centre the same CBI is condemned as the instrument in the service of the incumbent government.
This political culture, based on extreme righteousness and self-serving invocation of constitutional principles, does not help deepen the values and ethos of the rule of law. Excessive partisanship has in the past turned out to be the enemy of institutional democracy and its procedures, and could prove the democratic experiment's undoing if our leaders refuse to understand that fairness and self-restraint are to be practised by all.