Home ›› 24 Jun 2022 ›› Opinion
The US Senate is on the cusp of finalising its first bipartisan gun control bill in almost three decades. The proposed deal is far less ambitious than the proposals US President Joe Biden and his Democratic Party have made. Nevertheless, if passed, a country rocked by mass shootings in recent weeks will mostly welcome it.
It will also be a good day for bipartisanship, a perennially endangered species in Washington.
However, it is important to note that polarisation in the US, and the resulting stasis, is less a structural problem than it is a cultural one. Americans are living in a zeitgeist of political dysfunction, but zeitgeists change with time. Moreover, as demonstrated over the past week, bipartisan consensus on contentious issues such as gun control isn’t impossible.
Legislators in India can seldom live in such hope. They, too, confront polarisation daily. But theirs isn’t simply a damning indictment of the times. It is also the unintended outcome of a law that’s been baked into the Indian Constitution since 1985, and needs amending.
In this so-called Anti-Defection Law lies a provision that states that any member of India’s Parliament or state assembly will be disqualified if he or she “votes or abstains from voting in the House, contrary to any direction issued by his [or her] political party”.
In other words, there is no room whatsoever for legislators representing any party in India to vote according to the wishes of their constituents, or even their own conscience, if that would mean voting against the directives of their high command.
While all parties have clearly articulated manifestos, few politicians agree on every single issue. And yet, within legislatures, the law has granted an indiscriminate amount of power to party leaders and whips, whether in government or opposition, and reduced many well-meaning, independent-minded and issue-driven legislators to glorified rubberstamps. This has undermined the country’s legislative process and weakened legislatures that for decades acted as an effective counterweight to the already-powerful executive branch.
This stands in great contrast to Biden’s inability to cajole fellow Democratic politicians in the Senate and House of Representatives – especially those who represent conservative, Republican-leaning states, or districts – to sign on to his big-spending, liberal agenda.
And yet, it is hard to see why Biden would be tempted to use such a law (even if there was one) to crack the whip on his party colleagues. Certainly not when, rare though it may be, he and his party have the incentive to corral support from Republican legislators on less contentious but no less important bills.
It might be a different story in the UK, where Prime Minister Boris Johnson, for instance, might be more tempted to wield such a law, if he had the option.
Earlier this month, Johnson withstood a robust challenge from 148 fellow Conservative members of Parliament to win an intra-party confidence vote. He could still be forced out of Downing Street, well before the next general election in 2025, given sagging public support over a scandal that refuses to disappear and the poor state of the UK economy.
It will come as a surprise to Indian political watchers that it was the ruling party’s “backbenchers” – rank-and-file legislators who fall low in the pecking order – who initiated the confidence vote against Johnson. This would be unthinkable in India, where, thanks to the Anti-Defection Law, it is impossible for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s fellow Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) legislators, including his immediate rivals, to speak up against him in Parliament – let alone initiate a confidence vote against him. This is the case even though Modi has faced a number of political headwinds since coming to power eight years ago, including a deadly second coronavirus wave last year.
National
