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THERE is nothing inherently sacrosanct about the speaker of parliament, any parliament. If you compare the speaker of Australia’s parliament with India’s, as some media analysts tried to do recently, you could be missing the point. Speakers of parliament have ushered in fascism and they have rescued democracies. There were revolutionary demagogues in their ranks and there were agents of military coups.
The choice of speaker in a nation’s parliament can reflect crisis or it can denote stability. In Pakistan’s parliament, after Jinnah and before the creation of Bangladesh, all the speakers belonged to East Bengal. When they aspired to a larger political role, the nation broke into two.
It is difficult to say if Hashemi Rafsanjani was a more powerful Iranian leader as the speaker of the Majlis, when he would lead the Friday prayers with Kalashnikov in hand, or whether he was a better president.
Without Hermann Goering as speaker of the German parliament Hitler might never have come to power. After the inconclusive polls of 1933, Hitler ordered his Nazi deputies to vote with the communists, even though the idea was nauseous to him, to bring down the government of Chancellor Franz von Papen. Sensing the plot, Papen got President Hindenburg to sign a decree to dissolve the parliament. William Shirer astutely captured the political vaudeville, which has since been repeated in many democracies, including India. Shirer writes:
“When the session reconvened Papen appeared with the familiar red dispatch case which, by tradition, carried the dissolution order he had so hastily retrieved. But when he requested the floor to read it, the president (speaker) of the Reichstag managed not to see him, though Papen, by now red-faced, was on his feet brandishing the paper for all in the assembly to see.
“All but Goering. His smiling face was turned the other way. He called for an immediate vote. By now Papen’s countenance, according to eyewitnesses, had turned from red to white with anger. He strode up to the president’s rostrum and plunked the dissolution order on his desk. Goering took no notice of it and ordered the vote to proceed. Papen, followed by his ministers, none of whom were members of the chamber, stalked out.
Even in a stable democracy like the United States, the speaker managed to subvert the people’s mandate.
“The deputies voted: 513 to 32 against the government. Only then did Goering notice the piece of paper, which had been thrust so angrily on his desk. He read it out to the assembly and ruled that since it had been countersigned by a chancellor who had already been voted out of office by a constitutional majority it had no meaning.” Next we know, thanks to the speaker’s efforts, what became of Germany.
Even in a stable democracy like the United States, the speaker managed to subvert the people’s mandate. House Speaker John Boehner’s rivalry with President Barack Obama became a grudge match against the US Constitution.
Boehner’s decision to invite Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address Congress without consulting the sitting president is said to have no precedent in American history. In fact, it is believed to have been unconstitutional.
To make the standoff bitterer, Boehner, a Republican, bragged that his failure to communicate with the White House was not an oversight. “Like a schoolboy passing notes when the teacher turns to the blackboard,” observed an analyst, “he sneaked behind Obama’s back to set the date for … Netanyahu’s speech with his country’s ambassador to the United States. Boehner asked the foreign dignitary not to tell the US president.”
Goering’s example to outwit the opposition with facile recourse to democratic procedure has been used by the Hindu revivalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to good effect in India. In October 1997, Uttar Pradesh speaker Keshari Nath Tripathi, a BJP nominee, deliberately split the Dalit party of then chief minister Ms Mayawati. It didn’t seem to matter that the nation was aghast at the subterfuge used to help the BJP win the trust vote.
The approach is par for the course for other major parties, including the Congress, though it leans more on bribing MPs to win parliamentary trust votes rather than seeking to split the opposition. That’s what Prime Minister Narasimha Rao did in 1993. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was accused of doing it in 2009.
Elsewhere in India, at a different time, the Supreme Court censured the speaker of the Karnataka assembly after he arbitrarily disqualified 16 MLAs ahead of a trust vote. The BJP survived the contest after 11 party rebels and five independent deputies were removed from the arithmetic in the house.
The speaker of the BJP-dominated Lok Sabha in India recently suspended 25 Congress MPs for alleged misbehaviour. Some described the unprecedented move as a dark day for India’s parliamentary democracy. A respected columnist argued, wrongly in my view, that it was the only way to tame an increasingly unruly parliament.
As an admirer of India’s amazing constitution, I believe in the litmus test more valid today than ever before: did the punishment of the MPs help stem India’s slide towards religious fascism? If it did not, the speaker’s decision will continue to be questioned.
India’s Sumitra Mahajan became speaker of the Lok Sabha as a consequence of the emphatic mandate for a rightwing religious revivalist brand of politics initiated by Narendra Modi. Had he not got 282 seats in the Lok Sabha she might not have become its speaker.
By contrast the Greek parliament’s speaker, a woman like Ms Mahajan, has drawn flak for her leftwing views. A Facebook campaign for the ouster of House speaker Zoi Konstantopoulou gathered 18,500 “likes” but failed to fetch her ouster.
Parliament is the temple of democracy and debate and discussion is its raison d’etre, a fellow journalist wrote the other day. I am trying hard not to disagree with his idealism.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
Published in Dawn, August 18th, 2015
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