Instruments of Parliamentary Control

Parliament ensures the executive is held accountable at every stage of governance — when policy is being made, while a law or policy is being implemented, and after implementation. It does this through a distinct set of devices: deliberation and discussion, approval or refusal of laws, financial control, and the no-confidence motion.

Deliberation and discussion. During the law-making process itself, members of the legislature get to deliberate on the direction of government policy and the way policies are actually carried out. This kind of scrutiny is not limited to bills — it also happens through general discussions in the House. The Question Hour, held every day Parliament is in session, is where ministers must respond to searching questions raised by members; Zero Hour lets members raise any matter they consider important, though ministers are not obliged to respond; and there are also half-an-hour discussions on matters of public importance and adjournment motions, among other tools of control. Question Hour is arguably the single most effective of these — members show intense interest in it, and attendance during this period is consistently high. Most questions try to draw out information from the government on issues of real public concern — price rise, food-grain availability, atrocities against weaker sections of society, riots, black-marketing, and similar issues. This gives members a chance to criticise government and to represent the specific problems facing their own constituencies. Discussions during Question Hour often get heated enough that members raise their voices, walk into the well of the House, or walk out in protest altogether — costing the House real legislative time, but also functioning, in their own way, as political techniques used to extract concessions from the government and force it to remain accountable.

Approval and ratification of laws. Parliamentary control is also exercised through the power of ratification: no bill becomes law without Parliament's approval. A government backed by a disciplined majority may not find this difficult, but such approvals cannot simply be assumed — they are the outcome of real bargaining and negotiation among members of the ruling party or coalition, and between the government and the opposition. Where the government commands a majority in the Lok Sabha but not in the Rajya Sabha — as happened during the Janata Party government in 1977 and the NDA government in 2000 — it is forced into substantial concessions to secure approval in both Houses. Several bills, including the Lok Pal Bill, have failed to be enacted for exactly this reason, and the Prevention of Terrorism Bill was rejected by the Rajya Sabha in 2002.

Financial control. As already noted, resources to run government programmes are granted through the budget, and preparing and presenting the budget for legislative approval is a constitutional obligation on the government. This obligation is what allows the legislature to control the government's purse strings — in principle, the legislature can refuse to grant resources. In practice this rarely happens, since the government ordinarily commands a majority in a parliamentary system. Still, before granting money, the Lok Sabha can discuss why the government needs it, and it can examine cases of financial misuse on the basis of reports from the Comptroller and Auditor General and the Public Accounts Committee. Legislative control here is not only about financial propriety — through financial control, the legislature is really scrutinising and shaping the government's underlying policies, since those policies are reflected directly in the budget.

No-confidence motion. This is the single most powerful weapon Parliament has for ensuring executive accountability. As long as the government retains the support of a majority party or coalition in the Lok Sabha, the House's power to dismiss it through a no-confidence motion remains more a theoretical possibility than a real one. But since 1989, several governments have actually been forced to resign for exactly this reason — in every such case, the government in question had lost the confidence of the Lok Sabha because it could no longer retain the support of its coalition partners. …