I happened to interview Indrajit Gupta, veteran communist, some two decades ago. It was part of our work then, at The Hindu, commemorating fifty years of freedom. A communist of repute, Gupta had also earned a name for himself as eminent Parliamentarian and was, at that time, the one who had been in the Lok Sabha longest. He also happened to be the Union Home Minister in the cabinet headed by I K Gujral.

A not-so-old journalist that I was then (it was my sixth year in the profession) and hence haughty as well, I expected the veteran to lament the fall in standards of behaviour on the floor of the House; that is why I asked him a direct question as to how he saw the fall. Pat came the response. Let me paraphrase what he said and I reproduced faithfully in that volume we put together at The Hindu, released as a supplement, free with the day’s newspaper on August 15, 1997.

Nothing has gone wrong. Parliament in the 1950s and 60s was a mere talking shop with men holding high educational degrees belonging to the elite communities dominated. In recent years, we have representatives of the poor and the deprived dominating the proceedings. This is what it should be and I have no regrets, he said shutting me up and sending me scurrying for the next question.

I was aghast. Neither Gupta nor I were unaware, by then, of repeated adjournments of both Houses of Parliament following one or another political group in the opposition marching into the well of the House, shouting slogans rather than raising issues pertaining to their constituencies or their political preferences. There had been sessions, which began and ended without transacting any business, in the few years since 1993. There was also the episode of MPs having voted against their party’s whip to save the government of the day from falling and evidence emerging that of a lot of money changing hands just the day before voting on the no-confidence motion. At least half a dozen of such MPs were even found to have deposited such money into fixed deposit accounts at a branch of the Punjab National Bank in Naoroji Nagar, New Delhi.

Gupta knew all these and yet held with conviction that things were hunky dory. Well. I did see a point in what he said. There were, indeed, such scandals involving well-mannered political stalwarts in the past too. The Mundra scandal, for instance, where the wonderful T T Krishnamachari and even Jawaharlal Nehru were implicated and M C Chagla, then judge of the Bombay High Court, found substance in what Feroze Gandhi, equally well-mannered and educated alleged in Parliament. However, I also thought that Gupta held out this argument for his own reasons: Having belonged to a wealthy high-cultured household and hence having had the opportunity to have went over to England to study and turned a communist, he was conscious of the need to de-class himself and hence his contra argument.

Well. He was firm and stressed that Parliament in the 1990s was truly a microcosm of the India as it existed and that is what it shall be. It cannot remain a talking shop or a debating society.

I happened to interview, yet another veteran in Parliament; Madhu Dandavate, however, was defeated from Rajapur in Maharashtra in the 1996 elections and his principles led him to refuse a seat in the Rajya Sabha that his party, the Janata Dal, offered him. Dandavate was not as impressed with the Parliament of then (I mean 1990s) as was Gupta. He did not lament. Dandavate restricted himself to recalling the good old days when Feroze Gandhi set the stage to use the privilege of an MP (guaranteed by Article 105 of the Constitution) to turn the House into a check against corruption and excesses even before the media took it up. Dandavate also recalled Jyotirmoy Bosu and how the communist MP used his office to further democracy and expose the then Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi’s indulgence towards her son, Sanjay Gandhi in the Maruti Car Factory project.

Dandavate also recalled that Parliament was also a space for a lot of humour with such men as the acerbic Minoo Masani and Piloo Mody taking on Jawaharlal Nehru; or N C Chatterjee’s repartee to Nehru, during a debate on Aksai Chin and India’s lack of defence there. Nehru, in passing had mentioned that this was a place where not a blade of grass grew and Chatterjee standing up showing his own bald head and pointing to that of the Prime Minister’s too and wondering whether they were dispensable too since nothing grew on them!

Well. All those are not there with us now. A generation that participated in the struggle for freedom, dominated Parliament and the nation’s political life, interacted with the people and internalised their problems and set out to Parliament House on days when the House was in session to speak out their minds, engage with those on the other side and thus contributed to the making of the modern nation are dead and gone. And I will stick my neck out to say that even Indrajit Gupta, at the risk of being called an elite or a bhadralok will not hold a brief for Naresh Agrawal for what he uttered (but removed from the records) in the Rajya Sabha early this week.

A friend in New Delhi asked me as to whether what Agrawal did was part of the socialist legacy. I said no. Agrawal does not, in any case, belong to that legacy just because he is now a Samajwadi Party member. He was a Congress MLA until the early 1990s, defected with 12 others in the UP assembly to sustain a BJP government in return for a ministerial berth and called his party the Lok Tantric (pun intended) Congress before wearing the Samajwadi band. Ram Manohar Lohia, whose acerbic taunts at Indira Gandhi within and outside Parliament will be remembered for long, was never known to have used expletives on the floor of the House (during his short stint in the Lok Sabha from 1963 to his death in 1967) of the kind that Agrawal was heard using. And there is nothing socialistic about this sir, I told him.

And lest it appears that taunts came only from the socialists. Feroze Gandhi was known for his taunts and he belonged to the Congress. Atal Behari Vajpayee, belonged to the Bharatiya Jan Sangh. And I recall S Jaipal Reddy, who had journeyed into the Janata Party riding the Congress (O) chariot and as MP between 1984 and 1989 attacked the Rajiv Gandhi government almost by the day in Parliament. I recall his speech, full of puns, while speaking on a debate involving the construction of a farm house by Satish Sharma and repeatedly mentioning that the house had a swimming pool in which Italian marble was used; Reddy repeated ‘Italian’ several times on the floor of the House and everyone, including Rajiv Gandhi knew, what he intended then.

That speech would haunt him many years later when he led the charge against Vajpayee, sometimes in the late 1990s. Reddy was now back with the Congress and Sonia Gandhi, sitting next to him on the front row of the opposition benches when Prabhunath Singh, certainly not known for his skills to cull out documents from the archives and debate in Parliament (as much as he was known to ‘deal’ with anyone who crossed his path in the hinterlands in Bihar) began reading out from Reddy’s speech in the 1980s and repeating the ‘Italian’ part in that speech to embarrass Reddy.  Not even Jaipal Reddy would hold a candle to Naresh Agrawal.

It should not matter if Agrawal was just an aberration. His remarks, after all, are not part of the records and even those who seek to research in some years ahead will not know what he said and Parliament, at least for the records, will be seen as a space for decent debates. But then, what we saw early this week in the Rajya Sabha was not a mere one-off event. It is very much a part of the sequence of ugly scenes that one saw some years ago in the UP State assembly in Lucknow when MLAs were seen hurling microphones and furniture against each other; it happened in the Tamil Nadu assembly as well a few months ago.

It is not as if that MPs and MLAs are to be forbidden from shouting out and sloganeering. They are free to do all that and also sit on dharnas, lead such forms of protests as picketing and fasting and stoppage of work. But then, they shall not do these on the floor of the House. Their right to indulge in all these activities stops at the entry gates of Parliament House and certainly so on the floor of the House. Article 105 of the Constitution renders them immune from any action in the court of law ‘for anything said or any vote given’ by them in Parliament. Feroze Gandhi, Madhu Dandavate, Jyotirmoy Bosu and Atal Bihari Vajpayee used this to deepen democracy on many instances and set standards; such eminent men like S Ananthasayanam Ayyangar and P G Mavlankar, as Speakers of the Lok Sabha expanded the scope of this substantially and thus contributed to democracy.

A lot of money is spent, day after day, to preserve printed volumes of these debates in Parliament House Library, one of the best maintained ones in the country; a lot of money is spent in maintaining the premises, centrally air-conditioned and on the comfortable chairs and tables so that our MPs have access to educate themselves reading through the stellar debates and discussions in Parliament in the past. Our MPs, including Naresh Agrawal (I am sure), have travelled across the country and also abroad as part of missions to learn about best practices. And have had ample opportunities to learn that use of expletives or throwing microphones or marching into the well of the House shouting slogans are not taught anywhere as best practices.

If they refuse to learn, there are two things that need to be done soon. One is to exclude them from such education tours at the expense of the people of this nation; and two is to recover the money spent hitherto from the salaries and allowances that they draw, irrespective of whether they blurt out expletives (only to be expunged from the records) or force adjournments by marching into the well of the House or simply while away time sipping cups of coffee or tea at the Central Hall and pay a vulgarly meagre amount because the rest of the cost in these canteens are covered by subsidy.

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