January 14, 2020
The constitutional provisions have existed since 1992
Why then did the President of India (read the Union government) scramble to
dismiss the government on March 27, just a day before the vote of confidence The
Congress approached the Nainital high court against the dismissal of their
government.Politically motivated manipulation of constitutional powers is not
new.
Consider that the consequence of a state government being dismissed is not
the empowerment of local governments, to pick up the slack and fill the vacuum,
but instead power is sucked back to Delhi where all state-level politicians
aspire to work.
The curious case of Uttarakhand shows that getting elected to
political office confers powers Cube
vacuum storage bags Factory but no responsibilities. The otherwise placid,
hilly paradise was rocked by frenzied politicking, as Congress dissidents lit a
fire under their own government, even as forest fires lit to clear shed pine
leaves gusted up clouds of carbon and heat.
The honourable single-judge ordered
on March 29, somewhat unusually, that the Congress test its numbers in the House
on March 31 even though the Legislative Assembly had been suspended by the
President of India.The curious case of Uttarakhand shows that getting elected to
political office confers powers but no responsibilities. Would the Uttarakhand
Congress dissidents have been as ready to rebel and trigger the dismissal of
their government if the consequences were that elected leaders at the town and
village levels would get vested with the executive powers of erstwhile state
ministers and carry on working Consider also whether the Union government would
have been as willing a participant in the dismissal game, if the consequences
meant executive powers being transferred lower rather than to the national
level.
A second option to hold politicians to account is to devolve political
office and powers closer to where voters live so that people can actively
participate in overseeing an elected politician. Leading up to November 2000,
when the state was formed, the mood was upbeat and passions inflamed. The hilly
areas of Garhwal and Kumaon had revolted against the allegedly quasi-colonial
rule from Lucknow — the erstwhile city of nawabs, sheermal, galawati kebabs and
the capital of Uttar Pradesh.org, flooded Telecom Regulatory Authority of India
with electronic messages. The "Save the Net†campaign last year and subsequently
supporters of Facebook/Internet. But Indian voters do not have this power,
unlike in North America and Switzerland.
But it fell, because former chief
minister Vijay Bahuguna and Mr Rawat’s ex-buddy from Garhwal, Harak Singh Rawat,
and seven others pulled the plug on it.The writer is adviser, Observer Research
Foundation. What followed was a comedy of high-level bungling. The India-Bharat
class divide exists even in politics. Despite the rhetoric, there is little
political appetite to let go of centralised powers in the Union and the state
governments — both of which function remotely from people.
Technological
improvements can help. Can we do better Being empowered to recall recalcitrant
public representatives can make public representatives responsive to
citizens.Sadly, the five-yearly spells of public accountability do not protect
citizens sufficiently from irresponsible governments. Nor were there difference
with the party around policy, legislation or programmes. Apparently, the average
citizen gets galvanised politically only when it is time to vote.Consider also
how dysfunctional our political parties are. Voters could similarly message the
Election Commission. Equally, it was irresponsible of the Congress, to ignore
the growing dissidence, secure in the belief that the anti-defection legislation
could contain dissidence and that there was still one more year before citizens
could vote to call it to account.Petty palace politics and dodgy moves will
continue to blight political stability and retard effective executive action,
unless we rejig the institutional structure to generate political incentives.The
Harish Rawat-led Congress government still has one year to go. Expectedly, this
order was stayed on appeal by a division bench of the court.
The Speaker, Govind
Singh Kunjwal, disqualified the dissident Congressmen the anti-defection
legislation for voting against the government. It was not always like this. A
significant section — more than a quarter of the Congress MLAs — could not
resolve their grievances through inner-party governance systems and chose to
create a constitutional crisis to hit back at their party. But it is alleged
that he did so only after the President of India had already put him and the
state Legislative Assembly under suspended animation by dismissing the
government. Their rebellion was borne out of perceived insufficient recognition
by the party of their merit, effort and political standing.Our centralised,
political ecosystem and architecture have created political interests at the
national and the state level. They did not act out of high moral principles.True
to their class ethic, state-level politicians perversely prefer to lose power to
an opposing party, in the hope that it would come back to them one day, rather
than see power trickle away permanently down to local levels.
The constitutional
provisions have existed since 1992, but they have never been implemented in good
faith and with full earnestness. Biometric identification can cheaply and
correctly verify discontented voters who could digitally communicate their
intent to recall, thereby triggering a re-election. But consider how low
representative democracy has fallen and how remote politics has become from the
people who chose to remain indifferent to the political machinations. Tellingly,
citizens were more concerned with managing the forest fires than the fallout of
the political shenanigans. Their timing was cannily disruptive since the annual
budget could not be approved — politically effective but irresponsible from a
citizen’s viewpoint.
Citizens must be able to hold governments to account in
real time. Cut to 2016, and the dismissal of a duly elected government evokes no
popular response at all beyond gossip at nukkad teashops. Rarely does a
village-level politician graduate to politics at the state level and even less
so to the national level. Also, subsequent to the budget approval snafu,
governor Krishan Kant Paul had already directed on March 18 that the state
government prove its majority on the floor of the House on March 28
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