Santwana Bhattacharya By

In the first adventure of Jonathan Swift’s seminal satire, Gulliver is shipwrecked on the shores of Lilliput, and gets caught in the cross-fire of Blefuscudians and Lilliputians. The main point of conflict between the two sides was basically this: the two ate their eggs, by rule, from two different sides. One from the narrow end and the other from the broad end. In democratic India too, as elsewhere in the world wherever there is a semblance of governance, lives of citizens are governed by rules.

The Indian Constitution, though seemingly frozen in black-and-white writing, is one of the most flexible, allowing lawmakers to amend its letter. (In 68 years, amendments have crossed the century mark.) But then, timing, circumstance and procedure are of paramount importance. (‘Did you send the file to the L-G?’) If you act in haste and leave the fine print to retrospective wisdom, there may be no escape from prospective litigation.

You can bend the law only that much, otherwise you get caught with egg on your face. That’s what happened to Arvind Kejriwal — the maverick Delhi Chief Minister at the helm of Aam Admi Party, the bold new idea that attracted so many PLUs, young people without family backing or prior participation in a people’s movement, anything that granted access to the rarified echelons of power politics. Two years on, the wages of idealism are beginning to pile up. Things are at that delicate stage where a rebellion against the ‘system’ is morphing into another edition of the ‘system’, with its rebelliousness confined to not conforming to the old niceties.

The issue is not about political viability, but about people’s belief that someone is an agent of change. From Rajiv Gandhi to Narendra Modi, Indians have frequently cheered a new face with a new hope story. Kejriwal came in riding on such a hope story, a vision of radically alternative politics. The present controversy, set off by Kejriwal’s appointment of 19 parliamentary secretaries in Delhi assembly, may seem like a small ripple in the huge churnings that make Indian politics. But it’s an interesting one: for it marks a subtle but deep crisis in his narrative, defining the point of his cooption by the ‘system’.

However much he tells his charmed audience that he’s setting his own rules, something rings hollow. Front-page infamy, the ‘office-of-profit’ taint — even re-election to the seats, if the EC disqualifies the MLAs — nothing will threaten the political viability of his party. He will grow in Punjab, Goa, perhaps even Gujarat. But what it does is mark AAP’s transition from a young idealistic party to one in the secondary stage of evolution, en route to becoming one more of the old guard. This is a form of corruption, albeit not of the monetary kind, which AAP likes to limit the idea to. It belongs in the territory foretold by Lord Acton’s famous maxim.

Why does the clash between crusty old rules and Kejriwal’s brash defiance yield such conclusions? For one, witness the fact that in his defence he’s falling back on nothing more enlightened than the line that ‘BJP and Congress did it too’. That begs the question — why then would we need AAP? It’s a bit rich for Kejriwal to claim permanent immunity from being scrutinised on questions of political propriety.

The post of parliamentary secretary is essentially a sop given to MLAs who missed being ministers, and there is a cap on how many can get it. Delhi has a cap of 10 per cent. In 2015, the Calcutta High Court had struck down a bill by which Mamata Banerjee doled it out to 26 MLAs — the gravy train was to give them salaries etc on par with junior ministers. So there is nothing particularly reformative in trying to extend the ceiling.

In AAP’s case, it caters to the same instinct: it’s an incentive to prevent MLAs from being lured by poachers, or straying into rival factions (like the one led by Yogendra Yadav and Prashant Bhushan). In short, a glorified form of bribe: exactly the sort of politics he had built himself up by critiquing. Contrary to Kejriwal’s pious posturing, the older parties indeed come out looking better — at each comparable stage, they followed rules.

Just like with the Lilliputians and Blefuscudians, the Indian ‘system’ too demands compliance. Here lies the rub: you cannot claim to be part of the system and subvert it at the same time, or vice versa, and in the same breath, peddle it as ‘alternative politics’. Kejriwal tripped up in behaving like others and still claiming ‘I-am-different’. There is a larger question here: the sacrosanct role of the lawmaker. We have the inescapable fact that such posts compromise the ‘independence’ of the lawmaker. The ‘office of profit’ provision is designed to protect lawmakers from being influenced by the government of the day when they evaluate a piece of legislation. This autonomy of the individual legislator, the final people’s representative, has already been partly undermined by the anti-defection law. A debate on the 10th schedule — a response to the phenomenon of defection in the 1980s — has been brewing.

Former MP Manish Tewari had introduced a private member’s bill in 2010, arguing that it eroded the legislator’s rights to act according to his or her conscience and people’s interests. The spectre of the party whip is the troubling one here. It leaves no scope for “honest dissent”. The suggestion was the whip’s tyrannical hold be limited to a few crucial moments that threaten the government’s survival: confidence, no-confidence and adjournment motions, money bills et al. And that legislators be left free to take conscience calls while voting on all else.

Whether whips at the party level, or sops doled out by the government, the lawmaker’s role is under threat. With Kejriwal, it seems the more things change, the more they remain the same.

santwana bhattacharya is Political Editor of TNIE Email: santwana@newindianexpress.com