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Best Way To Fight Corruption: All-Party, All-Legislators’ Government!

By Dr. Satinath Choudhary

04 December, 2013
Countercurrents.org

Various ways and means have been suggested for reducing corruption. Instruments like Vigilance Department, CBI, Lokpaal, Lokaayukta, courts and stiff punishments for perpetrators of corruption are various means and ways of curbing corruption on the basis of fear of punishments. However, not enough attention has been given towards limiting opportunities for corruption by introducing structural transparency in the governing structure. Best way to do things with full transparency is to do it in the full glare of the public and opposition scrutiny. One way to do it would be to have all ministries headed by all-party collectives of equals, with each of the collectives having members from various parties in proportion to their strength in the assembly, as far as possible; all members of the assembly would be members of one or the other ministry. Various departments would be clubbed under one or the other ministry, giving us all-party, all- legislators’ government (aa-govt).

We all know the universal truism: “Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely!” In other words, we need to disperse power as much as possible to reduce corruption. The aa-govt would disperse “absolute executive power” of the erstwhile ministers (single person heading ministries) over the collective and then over whole assembly. There would be no need to anoint anyone as a minister and lavish him/her with “laal-batti”, big bungalows, large security details, and “swollen heads”! There is no need to single out a few individuals and create little monarchs working under a big monarchical CM, leaving rest of the MLAs with heartburns for not being considered fit enough to be anointed as a small monarch. Freshly elected MLAs are all equal. But in the current conventional system nearly half of them are sidelined as members of opposition whose job will be to say ‘no’ to everything proposed by the treasury bench. Even on the treasury bench side job of most (non-ministers) is going to be to blindly say ‘yes’ to all that is proposed by the monarchs. In practice most decisions are taken essentially by the big monarch with the help of a few cronies and bureaucrats. That is nothing but monarchy, which is the root cause of most corruption.

Currently single individuals working as ministers usually dispense with files in an arbitrary fashion with no one looking over their shoulders. Usually they depend heavily (possibly cripplingly) upon the department secretaries to take care of most of the files. They work under tremendous pressure from friends, relatives, colleagues, superiors, inferiors, personal and party beneficiaries and so on to do some favor to this or that person. If and when they have to take all decisions in collectives, they would easily be able to deflect all of the above pressures by saying, “Fine, I will present your case to the collective; it will then be for the collective to decide.” Further, all collectives’ decisions will have to be approved by the whole assembly. Thus “absolute executive power” of the erstwhile ministers will be dispersed not only over the ministerial collectives but over the whole assembly. This kind of dispersal of power is likely to considerably reduce corrupt practices.

Way back, at the time of constitutional debates Benjamin Franklin and other prominent leaders were worried about anointing a single individual with the responsibilities of executive, as they feared it would become “fetus of monarchy”. They had proposed twelve-person presidential council of equals to function as executive of the country while the Congress was not in session. Today Federal Executive Committee of seven persons equally empowered in Switzerland comes closest to what Ben Franklin had envisioned. The aa-govt proposed above extends the multi-member executives to all ministries and further, to the whole assembly.

Let us take a concrete hypothetical example of Delhi. Currently there are seven ministers in Delhi, including the Chief Minister (CM). Let us assume that seat distribution in Delhi in the current election happens to be: A: 43, B: 14, C: 10, D: 1, Independents: 2, total: 70.

The seven ministries may be headed by 70/7 = 10 member collectives. Priority of the members within any party, in picking a ministry of their choice to serve in, will be decided on the basis of votes they received. The 43 party-A members will be distributed (nearly) equally among the seven collectivized ministries thus: 43 div 7 = quotient 6, with remainder 1. Hence party-A would be entitled to fill, one by one in order of priority of its MLAs, 7 seats in any one ministry; and 6 seats in the remaining 6 ministries. Likewise other for other parties.

These multi-member ministries of equals will function just like joint parliamentary committees (JPC) or various standing committees of the parliament. The latter enjoy the reputation of working with greater transparency and insight than various current ministries headed by single individuals. In aa-govt there will be no question of instability of a government. Whatever combination of parties happens to be in majority in any of the ministries would be able to place its bill for consideration of the whole house. Whatever gets passed by the whole assembly will be law. An all-party government is particularly suited in case of hung Assembly. In this kind of government we won’t have just a few people anointed as ministers, leaving the rest with heartburns for not getting picked to be a minister. Aa-govt will also prevent intra-party war between two leaders aspiring to CM or PM. It can help unite two ideologically similar groups separated by personal ambition of their leaders to be CM.

National Governments have been seen from time to time in Canada, Newfoundland, Croatia, Greece, Israel, Italy, Kenya, Lebanon, Luxembourg, United Kingdom, United States, Zimbabwe, National parties, etc. A valid question arises: why didn’t these all-party national governments last long? I think the answer lies in the autocratic structure of the national government. They tried to fit various parties in the traditional autocratic straight jacket with a single PM; and ministries headed by single individuals from various parties. Various ministries are not of equal importance. So, many of the parties in the grand coalition might not have been quite happy with the distribution of portfolios, hence the breakup. On the other hand, if they had involved all of the members of parliament in one or the other collectivized ministries, they would not have had any beef against any individual or party. Hence it is important to think of a logical manner of involving all members of assemblies in the ministries that appears to be fair and square to all.

A middle way between the collectives of equals and the traditional ministries controlled by single individuals would be to declare the leader of the majority party or coalition as chairperson of the CM-council, who in turn would name chairs of various ministerial collectives from among members of the collectives. The function of the chairs will simply be to chair the ministerial committees’ meetings; otherwise the chairs would have no more weight than that of any others.

Multi-member Election Commission is supposed to work with greater integrity and transparency. Decisions of multi-member bench are weightier than those of single member bench. Group of Ministers (GoM) are supposed to be wiser than a single ministers. Likewise decisions of ministries headed by multi-member collectives of equals can be expected to be weightier, wiser, more transparent, fairer and “LESS CORRUPT”!

Dr. Satinath Choudhary taught Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in the USA, at Lincoln University, Pennsylvania and William Paterson University, New Jersey. He can be reached at [email protected]

 



 

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