Garga Chatterjee
In 2016, with another round of elections to the Rajya Sabha coming up in various state assemblies, the continued abuse of the idea of the Rajya Sabha by so-called “national” parties has come to the fore. A large number of Rajya Sabha members, past and present, have been representing states with which they really have no connection at all, thus undermining the very principle of representation that is supposed to be the bedrock of representative democracy. The present Rajya Sabha and the nature of nominations put forward by the BJP and the Congress (I) shows that they care more about representing their respective high commands. The state assembly members are a rubber-stamp for their masters from Delhi. The states and their people are simply an excuse for this elaborate charade, as far as “national” parties are concerned. This is nothing short of a betrayal of the people of states and the sacred concept of federalism, a basic feature of the constitution.
The Rajya Sabha, whose official English translation is the Council of States, is the upper-house of the Parliament of the Indian Union. Why does the Indian Union have a council of states? As the Rajya Sabha's official website says, “because a federal system was considered to be most feasible form of Government for such a vast country with immense diversities” and “It was meant to be the federal chamber i.e., a House elected by the elected members of Assemblies of the States and two Union Territories.” Given that Lok Sabha elections often happen around issues that have relevance across states, the Rajya Sabha, being elected by members of state assemblies, ought to represent issues of state interest that may be marginal in Lok Sabha elections. Additionally, the staggered nature of the Rajya Sabha elections also seeks to ensure a more temporally representative nature of the parliament, beyond the typically once-in-five-year dip-stick representation of the Lok Sabha. Also, in a nation of nations system like the Indian Union, the component ethno-linguistic nations, in the form of states, the Rajya Sabha ideally should look out for the interest of states when it comes to legislations.
How has this system worked? Let us take the case of Venkaiah Naidu, the present Union cabinet Minister of Urban Development, Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation and, most tragically, Parliamentary Affairs. Mr. Naidu, a Telugu born in Andhra Pradesh, was educated in Andhra Pradesh, was associated from a young age with the RSS in Andhra Pradesh, was elevated into political prominence via the ABVP in Andhra Pradesh, was elected multiple times to the state assembly of Andhra Pradesh, was the leader of the BJP legislative party in the state assembly of Andhra Pradesh, was from 1985-1993 successively General Secretary and President of the BJP unit in Andhra Pradesh, before going “national”. Since 1998, he has been elected 3 times to the Rajya Sabha, but never from Andhra Pradesh. That fortune or misfortune has been of Karnataka alone, whose BJP MLAs dutifully chose a man from Andhra Pradesh to represent Karnataka's voice in the Rajya Sabha, for obviously, a suitable Kannadiga could not be found instead. He has represented Karnataka for 18 years in the Rajya Sabha – enough time to make Karnataka his own, out of gratitude or posturing.
What has he done? He participated in 86 debates in Rajya Sabha from 9 June 2009 to 21 February 2014. Not one was related to Karnataka. However, the debates he participated in, included - The Andhra Pradesh reorganization Bill, Fire accident in Andhra Pradesh's Vishakapatnam, Formation of Telangana state out of Andhra Pradesh, Twin blasts in Andhra Pradesh's Hyderabad, threat to 18,000 Andhra workers in United Arab Emirates, Rail accident at Andhra Pradesh's Penneconda, Killing of an Andhra MBA student in London, Untimely heavy rains in Andhra Pradesh and so on. With his MPLADS fund, he adopted the Chepala Uppada village of Andhra Pradesh's Visakhapatnam district. After severe criticism in Karnataka, he took up a village in Bangalore rural.
Known to be a fiery speaker when in his elements, he is now a known votary of Hindi imposition on non-Hindi states. Himself a native Telugu speaker, he made the effort to learn Hindi to work his way up through his Hindi dominated party. In spite of 18 years of political support, the few speeches he ever made in Karnataka, he preferred to make them mostly in Hindi and has shunned Kannada or at least has not shown much effort to embrace Kannada in public. While he was being considered for a fourth term, a large group of self-respecting Kannadigas of Karnatak launched a campaign against his renomination from the state. The Venkayya Saakayya (enough of Venkaiah) stir seems to have been partially successful. BJP has now given Naidu the task of “representing” Haryana in Rajya Sabha! However, Naidu's replacement in Karnataka is another politician from Andhra Pradesh, the Tamil Nadu born Nirmala Sitharaman. BJP high command's Kannadiga MLA soldiers will dutifully ensure her victory, without an iota of shame. After all they are known to be obedient soldiers of the party who don’t disobey orders from Delhi, except when they did last time around and cross-voted for an independent candidate from Karnataka to the Rajya Sabha. His name was Vijay Mallya.
Venkaiah Naidu and Karnataka are not an exception. About 20% of the present Rajya Sabha MPs of the BJP are not from the states they supposedly “represent”. They include luminaries like Delhi-Mumbai-Delhi's Smriti Irani representing Gujarat, Delhi victorious – Punjab loser Arun Jaitley representing Gujarat, Maharashtra's Suresh Prabhu representing Haryana, Kolkata-Delhi's M.J. Akbar representing Jharkhand, Maharashtra's Prakash Javdekar representing Madhya Pradesh, Kolkata-Delhi's Chandan Mitra representing Madhya Pradesh, Delhi's Vijay Goel representing Rajasthan, Mumbai-Delhi's Ram Jethmalani representing Rajasthan and such. Congress has Uttar Pradesh's Mohsina Kidwai representing Chhattisgarh, Kashmir's Karan Singh representing Delhi (in a literal, representational and political sense), Uttar Pradesh and Mumbai's Raj Babbar representing Uttarakhand while the Andhra-JNU-Delhi revolutionary Sitaram Yechury has represented West Bengal since 2005.
Other parties have rarely engaged in such “representation.” The abuse of the system has been deep and bi-partisan and is largely a reflection of how national parties treat state legislators as servile peons for their parliamentary games, without minimal regard for the rights of states. Since June 2004 till date, the Leader of the House in the Rajya Sabha has not been a person who really belongs to the rajya or state he represents in that Council of States. Before “Gujarat's Arun Jaitley”, that vaunted post was occupied by “Assam's Manmohan Singh”, the two-time Prime Minister of the Indian Union. To satisfy the domicile clause of Rajya Sabha representation, Manmohan Singh produced papers that showed his “domicile” to be of Assam! The present President of the Indian Union, Pranab Mukherjee during his “representing” Gujarat in Rajya Sabha days produced LPG connection documents to establish Gujarat domicile! This domicile irritant was then altogether removed by the ganging up of Congress and BJP, leading to the explosion of Andhraites representing Karnataka, relieved from the task of producing LPG connection documents. The joke is on us, the people of states.
Perhaps this is to be expected in a fake-federal system like the Indian Union which considers the nation as some eternally preformed entity with the states being arbitrary administrative units. The US Congress is analogous to the Lok Sabha. Federalism in USA more than a semantic charade. Its upper house, the US Senate, isn’t analogous to the Rajya Sabha. In the US Congress and Lok Sabha, the numbers of seats are roughly proportional to population. This gives precedence to the whole, which is a historical, legal instrument, though much time and money is spent to create a fictional past for this legal form. The US Senate represents that strand where past compacts and differing trajectories and identities are represented in the form of states. States form the "United" States of America. Hence in the US Senate, the unit is the state, not the individual citizen and each state, irrespective of population, has two members. This respects equality of states and acts as a protection against the domination by more populous states.
In the Rajya Sabha, the seats allotted to each state are roughly proportional to its population. It doesn’t acknowledge equality of states. In the Rajya Sabha, the Rajyas aren’t the unit. For Rajya Sabha to be truly so, it has to be constituted on a fundamentally different paradigm than the Lok Sabha. Concerns, aspirations and visions of the future differ based on a region's perceived attitude towards a monolithic "whole". A federal democratic union is one that does not discriminate between aspirations and is flexible enough to accommodate differing aspirations. Rather than chanting "unity in diversity" as an anxious mantra of a paranoid monolith, we have to creatively forge unity through an honest assessment of diversity by admitting that the Indian Union is a multi-national super-state. Power must flow from truth.
