The following pages contain the result of research under a fellowship awarded by the Honourable Speaker of the Lok Sabha in July 2000 on intra-governmental relations in India. Before granting the fellowship the Fellowship Committee advised me to redesign the project in a manner that Parliament finds its due place in various aspects proposed to be dealt with in the project.
The pursuit of the revised project produced an output that, on further revision, called for a revision of the title. A re-reading of the Constituent Assembly proceedings and related documents confirmed the belief that an overwhelming majority of the Constituent Assembly members were in favour of parliamentary democracy of the British type being adopted for India. A major theoretical upshot was the centrality of the concept of Opposition in parliamentary democracy, right from the days of the Magna Carta, first to the King and then to his council of ministers. In British India the Governor-General was his surrogate and the legislature-representing the Indians-constituted the Opposition. The republicanism constitution of India replaced the Governor-General by an elected President with nominal executive powers. Instantly, the council of ministers became the real executive. Its responsibility to the legislature transformed the executive-legislature relationship of opposition per se. The legislature as a whole became the watchdog over the executive-including the administration. Within the legislature, however, opposition was institutionalised by the party system granting it a critical role. The Opposition is not only the conscience keeper of the Government but also the past and the future Government. In interacting with the Opposition the Government is talking with the past and the present. In a broad sense the Opposition has become a part of the Government.
A random survey of the Lok Sabha Debates revealed that nothing embodies opposition, and enforces ministrial responsibility, more than the debates on no-confidence and confidence. The constraint of time and space did not allow a fuller treatment of these debates. The limited treatment of such debates in the first thirteen Lok Sabhas here, however, has shown their enormous value in the working of parliamentary reform, both politically and procedurally, even though the confidence motions have often and the no-confidence motions always failed. The unstinted co-operation of Shri N.K. Sapra, the then Director, Lok Sabha Secretariat and his staff, particularly in the Lok Sabha Library. deserves to be acknowledged first. I have also used the libraries of the Delhi University and the Jawaharlal Nehru University. I have had the privilege of discussion with some officials and Members of Parliament, particularly Shri T.N. Chaturvedi and Shri Pranab Mukherjee of the Rajya Sabha and Dr. Biplab Dasgupta of the Lok Sabha. I have had the opportunity of testing some of my ideas in a workshop on the Indian Parliament organized by the Centre for Public Affairs, the India International Centre and the Konrad Adenaur Foundation at the India International Centre, New Delhi, on 25-27 August 2002 in a paper on Parliamentary Reform in India'. The proceedings of the seminar have since been published as The Indian Parliament: A Comparative Perspective, edited by Ajay K. Mehra and Gert W. Kueck (Delhi, Konark, 2003).
I am obliged to the Fellowship Committee for the grant and the suggestion on the theme of the project. Thanks are due to Dr Manindra Thakur and Shri Binod Kumar of the Developing Countries Research Centre. University of Delhi, for editing and secretarial assistance respectively
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