MPs deliberately wasting an entire
session at a monetary cost alone of Rs
170 crore. Dozens of MLAs going on
private pleasure trips abroad at public
expense. Never has democracy been so openly disgraced in our country. If
there is anything more offending than
these acts, it is parties putting the
blame on one another. All of them are really the same. All of them are
irresponsible and unethical when it comes to spending taxpayer's money on their
private agendas.
Currently a 17-member team from
Karnataka, many of them with families in attendance, is visiting South American
countries with a thoughtful stopover in Dubai.
Eighty MLAs from Maharashtra are rearing to land in Europe in a month or
so. If they went quietly without too
many pretensions, the public outrage would have been less. But they display
arrogance in justifying their indulgence. One freebooter from Karnataka even argued that their junket expenses were
nothing compared to the expenses on
terrorist Ajmal Kasab. How obnoxious can politicians get in their
insensitivity.
The disregard for public opinion
must be due to elections being decided not by voters but by courtesy of party
bosses, financiers and sundry fixers. The few leaders who show lip sympathy for
public opinion make lame excuses. “I am helpless because the Speaker had
cleared the trip”, said Karnataka's Chief Minister. But the Chief Minister is a
member of the special board, along with the Speaker and some others, who
approve proposals like junkets. Besides,
after the way B.S. Yeddyurappa ran the
Government, no one will say that the Chief Minister of Karnataka is helpless in
any situation. It is the state that is helpless before a chief minister.
The Congress and JD (S) leaders
blamed the Government for allowing the legislators to go. But what about their
own party people? The Karnataka team already in South America includes six
Congress MLAs and two from the JD (S). Why did not the two party high commands order
them to stay home?
MLAs forget party labels and act in
unison when it comes to their own privileges and emoluments. They are law
makers with constitutional authority and
if they make laws that suit only them, the rest of us have no way of
stopping them. The recent move –
hopefully abandoned since – to make Air-India's pilots and station managers
attend personally to the comforts of travelling MPs is still fresh in memory.
Karnataka MLAs forgot their party
differences and collaborated early on to
pass a rule that an MLA was entitled to one foreign and two domestic trips
during his term. This was bad enough since it had no purpose other than giving
MLAs a free jaunt at taxpayer's expense.
Then they went and expanded the rule, making two foreign trips part of an MLA's
“rights”. In their generosity to
themselves, they also ruled that (a)
they did not have to submit all the bills of expenditure and (b) they did not
have to submit a report on their study.
That made “study tours” a great
convenience. No report means more freedom to study shopping patterns in Lima, Peru and attractions in the
entertainment quarter of Rio de Janeiro. Not too many bills means yet more freedom
to squander the Rs 20,000 allowance they get per day in foreign exchange. The
allowance of course is from the public exchequer. In Moscow the study tour can
become a teaching tour with our MLAs
instructing Vladimir Putin on how to end dissidence through the art of
resort politics, an Indian speciality. There's no dissidence that cannot be
erased with a few crores – even in rubles.
The Speaker and Chief Minister of
Karnataka are said to have told MLAs to cancel forthcoming junkets. Don't be
fooled. What they mean is postpone by a couple of months by which time they
hope the people will have forgotten the current furore. These are types who
believe that squeezing the country is their right. Who will save us from these
turbulent priests of evil?