To your editor the best piece of news in recent weeks was the report in The Times of India of March 21 that the large number of members of parliament did not play truant at the present budget session now in recess and that they actually earned their pay! According to this report "Lok Sabha members worked harder than their predecessors in the last decade registering a productivity of 121%”. The Rajya Sabha too was not very far behind "notching productivity of 109%.” Parliamentary Affairs Minister M.Venkaiah Naidu hoped that this marked the beginning of a new way of "transparent governance in the country.” This might not be entirely true – at least not yet – but an important fact was Y. V. S. Reddy who gave a fillip to the concept of federalism and, in the process, providing an answer to members from various states ‘what’s in it for my state’.

The next step should be enforcing discipline in its proceedings. The Speaker should not be from the ruling group NDA or the UPA. The two groups should, before the elections, agree on a person who has training, strictness and the wisdom of a Vikramaditya (preferably a retired judge or jurist) who will have the courage, for example to ban members from rushing to the well of the house at the slightest excuse and disrupt proceedings. 

The third follow-up to take this forward is to cultivate a sense of bipartisanship. This is easier said than done. Pandit Nehru is rightly credited with nurturing and sustaining parliamentary democracy in India. But he did not encourage bipartisanship except when he was driven to a corner as during the Chinese invasion. At other times, Nehru would contemptuously reject or ignore our (The Swatantra Party’s) offers of support for instance because for him it came from a ‘Right Reactionary party of farmers and rich businessmen’. But that’s another story waiting to be told.