SWATANTRA—SEPTEMBER 20,
1947
WHEN Dr. T. S. S. Rajan moved in the Assembly on Monday that
the food situation be taken into consideration, Mr. B. S. Murthi said “I
request that the Prime Minister be present.” The speaker said “The leader of
the House (Dr. Subbaroyan) is here.” Mr. Murthi repeated “I want the Prime
Minister to be here.” Dr. Subbaroyan said that the Minister in charge of Food
would be able to cope with the situation.
* * *
Nobody ever said or could have
thought that in situations which the Food Minister could not cope with, the
Prime Minister is the one to be looked up to. Was it because the Constituent
Assembly could not cope with its work that a regular contingent of Madras
Ministers rushed to Delhi abandoning the province to its fate in the midst of a
daily worsening famine crisis? No other province has contributed so many
Ministers to the benches of the Constituent Assembly as ours, and no provincial
Ministry made such little mark there as the Omandurians did. The story is told
of one of the members of the Assembly, of how when a committee discussion was
going on as to whether the Centre or the Provinces should have the residuary
powers, he coped with the situation by suggestion “By why not divide them on
some equitable basis?” Guess who.
* * *
It is scarcely likely that any
demand for the presence of a Prime Minister like Churchill would have emanated
from any member of Parliament in the war period. It would have been assumed
that he was unavoidably detained by urgent indispensable work elsewhere, and
due respect would have been paid to the multifariousness of function of a
strenuous office making simultaneous demands on the holder’s time and energy.
At less momentous times Parliament did insist on the presence of absentee
Ministers. And speakers have been known to uphold the view that it was the
right of legislators to be listened to directly instead of by proxy by the
Ministers and it was the duty of the Ministers to give personal attention to
the criticisms made on the floor of the House about the administration of their
respective departments.
* * *
The Russian delegate at the UNO
is reported never to have been absent from any of its sessions even for a
single minute. Sri Prakasam while Premier set up a very high standard in the
matter of attendance in the legislature. He attended each day of each session
punctual to the minute and stayed to the end of business every day, allowing
himself no respite whatsoever. Only on very rare occasions was C.R. in
legislature. Legislators including Ministers are paid for with public funds to
attend sessions of the legislature and bestow their judgments on the topics
coming up there, and evasion of attendance is a lapse from the strict code of
rectitude. It is like being paid for a work and shirking it.
* * *
When Dr. Subbaroyan said that the
Food Minister “could cope with the situation even in the absence of the Prime
Minister,” the implication conveyed is, apparently, that the Prime Minister is
a tremendous parliamentary force held in reserve, to be called in only when
other ministerial resources are taxed to the utmost and found inadequate to
meet the situation. Why should anybody insult public intelligence by indulging
in fictitious make-believes of this sort that can deceive nobody? The plain
truth of the matter is that in the Prime Minister we have one whom it is
hopeless to bolster up as an able parliamentarian.—(September 20, 1947) S A K A.
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