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General Studies Paper 2

Context: On Mahua Moitra and panel’s disqualification recommendation

Introduction

• The alacrity with which the Lok Sabha Ethics Committee went about recommending the expulsion of Trinamool Congress Member of Parliament (MP) Mahua Moitra from the lower House is certainly not a sign of any fidelity to ethics, or fairness. The recommendation is a brazenly partisan attempt to silence a critic of the government.

Ethics Committee- Lok Sabha

• A Presiding Officers’ Conference held in Delhi in 1996 first mooted the idea of ethics panels for the two Houses.
• Then Vice President (and Rajya Sabha Chairman) K R Narayanan constituted the Ethics Committee of the Upper House on March 4, 1997, and it was inaugurated that May to oversee the moral and ethical conduct of members and examine cases of misconduct referred to it. The Rules applicable to the Committee of Privileges also apply to the ethics panel.
• In the case of Lok Sabha, a study group of the House Committee of Privileges, after visiting Australia, the UK, and the US in 1997 to look into practices pertaining to the conduct and ethics of legislators, recommended the constitution of an Ethics Committee, but it could not be taken up by Lok Sabha.
• The Committee of Privileges finally recommended the constitution of an Ethics Committee during the 13th Lok Sabha. The late Speaker, G M C Balayogi, constituted an ad hoc Ethics Committee in 2000, which became a permanent part of the House only in 2015.
• The members of the Ethics Committee are appointed by the Speaker for a period of one year.
• The 15-member Committee’s function is to examine every complaint relating to unethical conduct of a Member of Lok Sabha referred to it by the Speaker and make such recommendations as it may deem fit.

Concerns

• It is also a warning shot meant to intimidate MPs from doing their job of holding the executive accountable. Neither the process nor the conclusions of the committee are grounded in any decipherable principle.
• The committee, with the help of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology found that the MP’s credentials were used online from Dubai 47 times to access the Parliament portal.
• Parliamentary questions were submitted from abroad. As Opposition members in the committee have pointed out, the drafting and the submission of questions are routinely done by aides of MPs.
• And MPs raise questions in Parliament based on representations from various constituents. To assume without solid evidence that any question is in exchange of material favours and then to expel an elected MP, is an assault on parliamentary democracy itself.
• The committee is calling upon the government to investigate the allegation of ‘quid pro quo’ raised by one of its members against Ms. Moitra, after holding her guilty, turning the principle of natural justice on its head.
• If MPs are barred from sharing their login credentials with others, the rule must equally apply to one and all. Now that the committee has taken this extreme step of calling for the expulsion of an elected member from the House, thereby depriving the voters of her constituency representation, it should also investigate how other MPs prepare and submit parliamentary questions.
• The selective investigation of one MP, based on insinuations and conjectures, clearly comes out as what it is — intimidation. It is also in stark contrast with the tardy response of the Lok Sabha Committee of Privileges to a serious complaint against Bharatiya Janata Party MP Ramesh Bidhuri who used derogatory communal slurs against a fellow member in the Lok Sabha.

Conclusion

• That said, Ms. Moitra’s act of allowing a person who is not employed by her to execute official work on her behalf betrays a lack of discretion and judgement. This should act as a lesson for all those who seek to hold the government accountable: to keep themselves beyond reproach.