The Lok Sabha debate, yesterday, on the Rafale fighter jet purchase during which Congress president Rahul Gandhi sought permission to play recordings of a phone conversation and the ruling by speaker Sumitra Mahajan disallowing it provoked recalling one of Feroze Gandhi’s contributions to our democracy. It also involved a landmark ruling by the then Lok Sabha speaker, Ananthasayanam Ayyangar, interpreting Article 105 of the constitution that lay down the powers, privileges and immunities of parliament and its members.

I must confess this at the outset: I was exposed to this and many other episodes when those who occupied the speaker’s office elongated and strengthened their own offices and parliamentary democracy in the process, by late Madhu Dandavate in an interview. I happened to speak with him and many other veterans, in 1997, the occasion being a volume commemorating 50 years of our independence.

When Feroz Gandhi raised the scandal involving bad investments by the Life Insurance Corporation (LIC) into companies owned by Haridas Mundhra, his own party’s members in the Lok Sabha chided him, that all his allegations were based on hearsay and frivolous newspaper reports. Feroze, interestingly was Congress MP and he alleged wrongdoing by the then finance minister and Jawaharlal Nehru’s close aide, T.T. Krishnamachari to bleed LIC and help Mundhra!

Responding to the objections that these allegations were based on frivolous news-reports, Feroze Gandhi said, in Dandavate’s words: ‘Mr. Speaker sir (Ananthasayanam Ayyangar), they want a more reliable evidence; so will you allow me to lay on the table of the Lok Sabha the confidential correspondence between the principal finance secretary and the finance minister. T.T. Krishnamachari, which I have in my pocket?’

Speaker Ananthasayanam Ayyangar ruled allowing that and Dandavate remembered it verbatim: “So long as any honourable member of this House is willing to take full responsibility of the confidential document he is seeking to lay on the table of this House, even if it is brought by stealth, I will allow him to lay it on the table of the House.” This, Ayyangar held, was the meaning of Article 105(1) of the Constitution.

It may be stressed here that Ayyangar, a legal luminary in those days, a freedom fighter and among those who were consulted on legalese in the constituent assembly during the debates held that even if a document was ‘brought by stealth’ it ought to be allowed to be laid on the table of the House. This ruling, indeed, was landmark and the rest – Feroze arguing his case of wrong-doing by TTK to bleed LIC and help Mundhra make money – based on documents he had obtained by stealth (being a set of correspondence) led to Nehru appointing the M.C.Chagla commission of enquiry and TTK asked in the end to resign.

India’s first ever scandal involving the political and the business classes, thus unravelled in 1957, would not have reached its end without Ananthasayanam Ayyangar’s ruling that anything and everything can be laid on the table of the Lok Sabha and relied upon for a discussion as long as the member affirmed its veracity.

It may be sheer coincidence that Feroze’s grandson, Rahul Gandhi sought the speaker’s sanction to play an audio recording of a conversation, allegedly between a minister in Goa and a journalist (whose identity is not known) mentioning claims by the former union minister for defence and presently chief minister of Goa, Manohar Parrikar that he had files pertaining to the Rafale purchase in his bedroom! An audio clip, indeed, is a document in the legal sense and should be treated the same way Ayyangar as speaker treated whatever Feroze Gandhi pulled out from his pocket and admitting it was brought by stealth!

Well. Sumithra Mahajan is not alone in the league of Lok Sabha speakers who cannot claim to have inherited the legacy of such of those who held that position in the past as Ayyangar and P.G.Mavlankar. And it was no surprise that she did not stick to precedence of the kind that Ananthasayanam Ayyangar had set in 1957. And one also witnessed Jaitley making a point of order on the audio clip and Rahul Gandhi’s right to present it and rely on it. He was on the wrong and explicable; he had a brief to hold against the opposition in parliament.

However, Mahajan ought not to have held a brief. The office of the speaker is meant to protect the rights of the members and not the executive. Mahajan happens to be occupying a position that Vithalbhai Patel did in the Central Legislative Assembly in the early 1930s. He ordered a policeman out from the visitor’s gallery of the assembly and that too on the day after Bhagat Singh threw a bomb from there! When the Home Member stood up to say he had permitted the cop there, Vitalbhai Patel held firm and asked the Home Member to hold his tongue and lest he too would be ordered out of the House.

The cop ran away and the Home member sat quite. Should we reconcile to a new order and a new reality and lament that Vitalbhai Patel, P.G. Mavlankar and Ananthasayanam Ayyangar belonged to another time?

V. Krishna Ananth is a Professor of History at SRM University, AP.

First Published:Jan 3, 2019 3:44 PM IST