How Vijay Mallya could end up having something in common with Indira Gandhi and Subramanian Swamy

What gets you expelled from Parliament? Our august Houses have often been described as rogues’ galleries and 34% of the 16th Lok Sabha members face criminal proceedings. Under the Representation of the People Act, members of Parliament cannot be disqualified unless they are convicted, since everyone is innocent until proved guilty. But staying elected is not the same as staying in the House, as Rajya Sabha MP Vijay Mallya is finding out.

The Rajya Sabha ethics committee wants to expel the businessman, embroiled in loan default on an epic scale. If it goes through with it, Mallya will only be the 15th parliamentarian to be expelled since 1951. Let no one accuse the Indian Parliament of intolerance, though it can be rather whimsical in its wrath. Legislators have been investigated for a range of offences, from taking bribes to being waggish. Ethics committees must patrol a nebulous boundary, where an MP’s parliamentary privileges end and misconduct begins.

Early exiles

Mallya is in interesting company. In 1951, HG Mudgal was thrown out of the provisional Parliament in the country’s first cash for questions scam. He was charged with accepting Rs 2,000 to lobby for the Bombay Bullion Merchants Association. The charges were led by Jawaharlal Nehru’s son-in-law, Feroze Gandhi, and Mudgal resigned before the resolution to expel him was put to vote. But the House expelled him anyway.

The incident was followed by Nehru sending out missives to chief ministers, telling them to behave, and the Speaker calling for a committee to frame rules of conduct for MPs. That would take about half a century in the making.

Indira Gandhi was expelled from the Lok Sabha in 1977, for obstruction, intimidation, harassment and filing false cases against officials who had been trying to gather material to answer a question in the previous House. The expulsion was rescinded a year later.

But whistle-blower and litigator extraordinaire Subramanian Swamy probably holds the record for the most dashing exit from Parliament. It was the year 1976, the Emergency was in full swing and Swamy had made himself scarce from the House for a while. He returned to the Rajya Sabha, however, on a day when the chairman was reading out names from an obituary list. After the last name was read out, Swamy decided to raise a “point of order”. Democracy had also died, he said, so it should have been included in the list. As the chairman asked the House to observe two minutes of silence in memory of the dead, Swamy slipped away.

The committee that expelled him said his “conduct was derogatory to the dignity of the House”, but it also threw in a few words about the “anti-India campaign” he was allegedly running abroad. Swamy was no fan of the Emergency.

Developing the code

In the 1990s, politics seemed to have reached a crisis of credibility in an era that saw vast changes in the shape of Indian democracy and there was a new concern about cleaning the Augean stables. The Bofors scandal had hit the headlines in the late 1980s, followed soon afterwards by the hawala scam. By the mid-1990s, the fodder scam, starring the Bihar Chief Minister Lalu Prasad, among others, was drawing national attention.

An introduction to the ethics committee put out by the Rajya Sabha mentions a “great strain” in the Indian political system and the growing criminalisation of politics, which called for a “self-disciplining mechanism”. The Vohra Committee report, presented before Parliament in 1995, had spoken of “the nexus between the criminal gangs, police, bureaucracy and politicians”, the inadequacy of the criminal justice system and the weakness of laws dealing with economic offences.

The Rajya Sabha got its first ethics committee, charged with formulating a code of conduct for MPs, in May 1997. It had the rather broad mandate of “overseeing the moral and ethical conduct” of its members. The committee dealt with the question of cross-voting, laid down rules for electoral propriety and grappled with the problem of dealing with members who had criminal records but had not been convicted and were shielded from judicial proceedings by parliamentary privileges.

The Lok Sabha got an ad hoc ethics panel in 2000 and an ethics committee with standing committee status in 2015, headed by Bharatiya Janata Party veteran LK Advani. It has not, however, delineated a code of conduct so far, nor does it keep a register of interests.

The Rajya Sabha’s code of conduct seems to have been shaped by one overriding concern: the conflict of interests embedded in various legislative decisions. MPs must declare their personal financial interests. If the private financial interests of a member and his immediate family clash with the public interest, the matter must be resolved so that the public interest was not jeopardised. The code also mentions that no member may accept bribes for voting a particular way in the House, moving a resolution or asking questions on a matter.

Some MPs clearly forgot to read the fine print.

In 2005, 11 MPs, one from the Rajya Sabha and 10 from the Lok Sabha, were expelled for “unethical and unbecoming” behaviour. They had been caught on camera accepting money for asking questions in the House. This year, the Narada sting case, where five Trinamool Congress MPs were allegedly caught on camera taking bribes, was referred to the Lok Sabha ethics committee.

Which ethics?

Probes and inquiries by ethics committees are the sign of a Parliament that worries about looking good, trying to reach areas of public action that are not strictly covered by law. They speak of a democracy that is trying to develop processes of accountability in its institutions. But even this process has a cheerful Wild West feel to it.

For instance, the Lok Sabha committee has a wide range of interests, since the “misconduct” to be probed by it is still cloudily defined, ranging from corruption to personal peccadilloes to flinging mics in Parliament. Besides, since it can only take up cases that are referred to it, several instances where conflict of interest seems obvious may have slipped through the cracks.

Take the case of the parliamentary committee on pictorial warnings, featuring beedi baron and Lok Sabha MP Shyam Charan Gupta, which found that there was no link between tobacco and cancer, after all. Or the time Hema Malini, who endorses a company that makes water purifiers, suggested tax cuts for companies that makes water purifiers. Did these not catch the ethics committee’s interest? There is no way of making sure, since neither the Rajya Sabha nor the Lok Sabha maintains a record of inquiries conducted by its ethics committees.

Until such practices are spruced up, you may get away with murder or you may be thrown out for getting cheeky. In Parliament, one never knows.