Finance Bill 2017: If Rajya Sabha's importance is diminished, Opposition has only itself to blame

Sometimes in order to make sense of the present, we need to take a look at the past. The finance minister has been hauled over the coals for taking the money bill route to push through key legislations. The Opposition and media have accused the NDA government of trying to undermine India’s bicameral Parliamentary system by robbing the Rajya Sabha of its jurisdiction and powers. This is a legitimate charge.

Arun Jaitley has defended the airdropping of an unprecedented 40 amendments to the Finance Bill, 2017 , as “incidental provisions”. Facing criticism in Lok Sabha from a united Opposition for tagging non-tax bills as money bills, the finance minister has quoted former Speaker GV Mavalankar to claim that when “a bill substantially deals with the imposition, abolition etc of a tax, the other provisions necessary for the achievement of the bill cannot take away from it the category of money bills.”

Jaitley’s arguments that amendments on tribunals relate to government expenditure and similarly, electoral bonds are linked to political funding, may be rooted in the letter of law but are against the spirit of debate and discussion that law-enactment must be subjected to. By taking recourse to legal loopholes while pushing through non-finance related amendments in Finance Bill, Jaitley may have done justice to his reputation as a seasoned lawyer but as the Union finance minister, has managed to set a dangerous precedent.

And yet, I would argue that the Opposition is equally, if not more, to be blamed for this unprecedented happenstance.

It is rather rich when parties like the Congress or Trinamool Congress cry foul over “murder of Parliamentary democracy” when for the better part of the last three years, they turned Rajya Sabha into an akhada for masochistic political wrangling. Session after session after session were adjourned, crores of taxpayers’ money flowed down the drain as the country was repeatedly witness to an artificial stasis in policy-making brought about by Opposition’s resentful tactics.

It was heartwarming, therefore, to see Congress repose such faith in Parliament when Jairam Ramesh stood up on Thursday and trained his guns on Jaitley in Rajya Sabha, accusing him of “reducing the Parliament to complete irrelevance.” The Indian Express quoted him as saying: “The finance minister has really made a serious effort to finish off the spirit of democratic discourse, to finish off parliamentary democracy to not only reduce Rajya Sabha to irrelevance but also to reduce Lok Sabha to complete irrelevance.”

Strong words. One wonders though where was this righteous indignation when the Congress forced repeated adjournments in both Houses of Parliament in December 2015, for example, over a court summons to Congress president Sonia Gandhi and vice-president Rahul Gandhi in the National Herald case? It would be worthwhile listening to Ramesh’s explanation on why that wasn’t an instance of subversion of Parliamentary democracy.

In case the senior Congress leader needs a memory refresher course, his party vice-president chose to interpret the trial court summons as “pure 100 percent political vendetta by the PMO (Prime Minister’s Office)” with a slanted remark about the government threatening judiciary. No amount of semantic jugglery would be enough to explain this as “respect for Parliamentary democracy.”

Ramesh’s party colleague Divgjiaya Singh sounded anguished on Thursday about finance minister’s tactic to bypass the Rajya Sabha and “snatch away” elder lawmakers’ right to discuss, debate and frame laws. Point taken.

However, the former Madhya Pradesh chief minister needs to be reminded that in the 2015 Winter Session — when Congress-led Opposition was busy using their numeric superiority to stall Rajya Sabha proceedings — nearly half of the Upper House’s time was wasted, leading to a loss of nearly Rs 10 crore to the public exchequer.

As a report in NDTV stated, “The Rajya Sabha where the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance is in a minority, lost 55 hours to disruptions by the Opposition. It was scheduled to work for 112 hours during the session.”

Incidentally, the lawmakers worked for an extra hour — 115 — instead of their scheduled 114 hours in the Lok Sabha, where BJP enjoys simple majority. This created a perverse situation where bills passed in Lower House were bottlenecked in the Upper House. The Lok Sabha passed 14 bills registering 104 percent productivity whereas in Rajya Sabha, that productivity nosedived to 46 percent. The GST consequently missed its 1 April, 2016 deadline.

The Congress and Opposition’s best defence of this self-defeating tactic was: “They did it too while in Opposition.”

These perfidious strategies to cripple the government’s legislative capabilities were clearly aimed at making it appear as if the Modi government has failed in its promise to usher in reforms having been voted in a promise of rooting out corruption and bringing “achhe din”.

A desperate NDA government started taking the Ordinance route. It used this method to pass the bills cleared by the Lok Sabha on insurance and coal auctions. But this, too, was criticised. As Swaminathan Aiyar noted in The Times of India column, “Modi was criticised for misusing the Constitution. Legal expert Rajeev Dhawan called his action “Constitutional terrorism”.

We note a change in government’s tactic as early as August 2015 when Jaitley dropped a hint for the first time that the government may consider obtaining legislative approval for key reforms through the money bill route as these cannot be subjected to the Raya Sabha censure.

Speaking at a conclave on 19 August, 2015, Jaitley was quoted by The Indian Express as saying: “If the stalemate (in Upper House) continues, then a lot of legislation would have to be framed as money bills… I think it is about time that we set up some good conventions in order to decide as the British did, as to how do you get legislative sanction when it is required for a reform. My own answer to this has been that it is the strength of public opinion, safeguards such as joint-sessions, safeguards such as money bills, which provide for legislation and part of the answer.”

I posit that we should see the government’s move in totality, not in isolation. While promising to root out corruption, one of its most crucial vote planks, the government had clearly planned to pass key legislations to go after tax evaders and initiate steps to ferret out black wealth. Modi had been ambushed by a resolute Opposition.

Taking the Finance Bill route, therefore, helps government bypass the Rajya Sabha’s amendments which — in keeping with government’s calculation — tried to water down the more stringent provisions that gives almost unlimited power to taxmen to go after cheats.

Critics have interpreted this as a return to “raid raj” but this is also true that these amendments — as noted by Saumitra Dasgupta in The Telegraph — “could remove an impediment to the resolution of a large number tax cases that have been stuck in courts across the country.”

The crux of the problem lies in overreach but it is a double-edged sword. The Modi government wants, as Dasgupta has noted, “to raise income tax collections by 24.9 percent to Rs 441,255.27 crore next fiscal from Rs 3,53,173.68 crore in the budget estimates for 2016-17” but this is not going to be possible merely by urging citizens to become more tax compliant. The finance minister in his Budget speech had stated that only 76 lakh people in India admit to earning more than Rs 5 lakh annually while two crore take international flights every year.

To increase tax compliance and strengthen the fight against corruption, therefore, the government needs to fortify the taxmen. While this may have its pitfalls, it does point to this government’s will to root out corruption. The Finance Bill amendments should be placed in this context.