Cong’s Manish Tewari moves bill to free MPs from fear of ‘whip’, for good law-making

Senior Congress leader and Lok Sabha member Manish Tewari wants freedom for the members of Parliament and legislatures in voting on bills and motions instead of the compulsion of toeing the party line. Tewari moved a private member’s bill with the proposition in the House during the ongoing winter session. As of now, members of the parliament who get elected after contesting on party ticket have to vote as directed by their party through a formal note—called the “whip”. The private bill proposes legislation for amending the anti-defection law to remove the compulsion. Tewari said the bill is his attempt to free lawmakers from “whip-driven tyranny”, and promote “good lawmaking”, while the exceptions would include trust votes, adjournment motions, money bills and other such matters “affecting the government’s stability”.

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The Lok Sabha MP from Chandigarh said the bill seeks to stress who has primacy in a democracy: “The elector who stands in the sun for hours… or the political party whose whip the representative becomes the helot of?”

Private member’s bills generally do not get passed, and Tewari has introduced this for the third time after 2010 and 2021, but his independent line is crucial at a time when the Congress has faced a string of electoral losses and there are noises of some internal rumblings in the party.

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Over the years, Tewari has often taken a different stance from his own party on many issues and had also participated in the Narendra Modi government’s global outreach after Operation Sindoor against Pakistan.

“This bill seeks to return conscience, constituency and common sense to the echelons of the legislature,” Tewari said while speaking to the news agency PTI.

‘Party whips turn lawmakers into lobotomised numbers’

Whips turn lawmakers into “lobotomised numbers” and “dogmatic ciphers”, he said.

“Laws are often pushed through without discussion. The reason for this, is that parliamentarians do not see a role for themselves in lawmaking,” he said.

“So, the law is made by some joint secretary in some ministry; it is brought to Parliament, where a minister reads out a prepared statement explaining what it is; then it is put to a pro forma discussion,” the MP said.

“And then, as a consequence of a whip-driven tyranny, those on the treasury benches invariably vote for it, and those on the Opposition benches vote against it,” he remarked.

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‘Defections have become a mega mall activity after 2014’

“From 1950 to 1985, MPs and MLAs, whips carried no coercive consequences,” he added. The whip tyranny started after the start of the trend of defections in 1967, called “Aaya Ram Gaya Ram” when one legislator in Haryana switched sides “eight times in one day”.

“Almost 18 years later, then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi brought the anti-defection law as the 10th Schedule to the Constitution of India,” he said.

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“It has been 30 years, the anti-defection law, however well intended it may be, has not been able to check the menace of defection.”

He said defections became “a retail activity in the 1960s, a wholesale activity by the 1990s; and by the 2000s, especially after 2014, a mega mall activity”.