The Speaker, Anti-Defection Law, Parliamentary Privileges and Committees

Parliament was never expected to work through the chamber alone. Four supporting institutions were built into or around it — an impartial presiding officer, a rule against buying legislators, a shield of privilege so members could speak without fear, and a committee system where scrutiny could actually happen. Each was designed to make the legislature a real check on the executive. Each has been captured, hollowed out or quietly disabled, and in four quite different ways.

The common failure and why the four belong together

• The distance between envisaged role and actual working is widest, and most measurable, in these four institutions.
  • The Speaker was designed as a neutral umpire and has become an office held by a working politician who expects to return to party life.
  • The Tenth Schedule was designed to stop defection and has instead transferred the power to decide defection to that same politician.
  • Privileges were designed to protect the legislator against the executive and are now most often used against journalists and citizens.
  • Committees were designed as the site of detailed scrutiny and can be bypassed simply by the government declining to refer a bill.
• The mechanism of failure is shared: each institution depends on a discretion that no rule constrains and no timetable binds.
  • The Speaker’s discretion over admissibility, certification and disqualification; the party’s discretion over the whip; the House’s discretion over what counts as contempt; the government’s discretion over reference to committee.
  • In each case the constitutional text supplies the power and leaves the restraint to convention — and the convention has not survived competitive party politics.
• The consequence is not collapse but conversion from an institution that scrutinises into one that ratifies.

The office of the Speaker: the constitutional design

The Speaker is the only officer of Parliament the Constitution insulates in the same way it insulates a judge — a charged salary, a special removal procedure, and conduct that cannot be discussed on the floor. The design assumed the office would be filled by someone willing to stop being a partisan. Nothing in the text requires that, and the assumption is where the whole architecture rests.

“The Speaker represents the House. He represents the dignity of the House, the freedom of the House and because the House represents the nation, in a particular way, the Speaker becomes a symbol of the nation’s freedom and liberty. Therefore, it is right that that should be an honoured position, a free position and should be occupied always by men of outstanding ability and impartiality.” — Jawaharlal Nehru

Election, tenure and removal

• Article 93 requires the House of the People to choose two members as Speaker and Deputy Speaker “as soon as may be”, and to fill a vacancy in either office as soon as it arises.
  • The election is by a simple majority of members present and voting, which means in practice that the majority party’s nominee is elected.
  • The Speaker must be a sitting member of the House and vacates office if he ceases to be a member.
• Article 94 sets out the three ways the office ends — ceasing to be a member, resignation addressed to the Deputy Speaker, and removal.
  • Removal requires a majority of all the then members of the House, not merely of those present and voting — a higher bar than an ordinary motion.
  • Fourteen days’ notice of intention to move the resolution is mandatory.
  • The proviso to Article 94 carries the single most distinctive feature of the office: the Speaker does not vacate on dissolution of the House, but continues until immediately before the first meeting of the newly constituted House. Continuity of the office is treated as more important than the mandate of the members.
• Article 96 bars the Speaker from presiding while a resolution for his own removal is under consideration, though he retains the right to speak and take part in the proceedings, and may vote in the first instance but not exercise a casting vote.
• Article 95 provides that the Deputy Speaker performs the duties when the office of Speaker is vacant, and that in the Speaker’s absence from a sitting the Deputy Speaker, or such person as may be determined by the rules of procedure, presides.
• Article 97, read with the charged-expenditure provision of Article 112(3), places the salaries and allowances of the Speaker and Deputy Speaker on the Consolidated Fund of India, so they are not submitted to the vote of Parliament and cannot be used as leverage against the holder.

The independence guarantees, and what they do not cover

• Conduct cannot be discussed in the House except on a substantive motion for removal — the same protection the Constitution gives judges of the higher judiciary under Article 121.
• The Speaker ranks sixth in the Table of Precedence, jointly with the Chief Justice of India, above Union Cabinet Ministers — an ordering meant to signal that the office is not subordinate to the executive.
• No member can be arrested within the precincts of the House without the Speaker’s permission, and the House’s own security and services are under the Speaker’s control rather than the government’s.
• What the design does not provide is any requirement that the Speaker sever party ties, any bar on contesting the next election on a party ticket, and any post-retirement position that would make severance costless.
  • The insulation is financial and procedural, not political — and it is political dependence, not financial dependence, that has proved decisive.

Powers over the conduct of business

• Article 118 empowers each House to make rules regulating its procedure, and the Speaker is the final interpreter of the Constitution, the rules and parliamentary precedent within the House.
• Admissibility of every motion, question and resolution is the Speaker’s decision — no-confidence motions, adjournment motions, calling-attention notices, privilege motions.
  • The power to admit is also the power to refuse, and a refusal is not reasoned, published or appealable.
• Expunction: anything the Speaker considers defamatory, undignified, unparliamentary or irrelevant may be ordered struck from the record, and expunged words legally cease to exist.
• Nothing goes on the record without the Speaker’s permission, which makes the official proceedings themselves a curated document.
• Suspension of members under the Rules of Procedure — naming a member, and in the graver form directing withdrawal for the remainder of the session — has become the routine method of managing a disruptive opposition.
• Article 100 governs voting: all questions are decided by a majority of members present and voting, the presiding officer does not vote in the first instance, and in the event of an equality of votes exercises a casting vote.
  • Speaker Denison’s rule, imported from the British Commons, disciplines that casting vote: it should be exercised so as to leave the question open for further discussion where possible, and otherwise in favour of the status quo — never to make a decision the House itself has not made.
  • Article 100(3) fixes the quorum at one-tenth of the total membership of the House.
• Article 122 shields all of this: courts may not inquire into the validity of any proceedings in Parliament on the ground of alleged irregularity of procedure, and officers vested with powers to regulate procedure are not subject to the jurisdiction of any court in respect of the exercise of those powers.

Powers over the fate of bills and of members

• Certification of money bills under Article 110(3) is the Speaker’s alone, and the certificate is declared final.
  • Because a money bill cannot be amended or rejected by the Rajya Sabha, the certification power is in substance a power to decide whether the second chamber will be consulted.
  • The route has been used for statutes far removed from taxation and the Consolidated Fund, and the correctness of the reasoning that upheld one such use was referred to a seven-judge bench, which has still not been heard. The Supreme Court (Number of Judges) Amendment Bill, 2026, taken through Parliament as a money bill in August 2026, has put the question back into live controversy.
• Deciding whether a bill is a money bill, a financial bill or an ordinary bill determines the entire procedure that follows, including whether the President’s recommendation is needed and whether a joint sitting is possible.
• The Speaker presides over joint sittings of both Houses under Article 118(4).
• Breach of privilege and contempt: the Speaker decides in the first instance whether a privilege notice discloses a breach and whether to refer it to the Committee of Privileges.
• Disqualification under the Tenth Schedule is the most consequential of all, and is dealt with in its own section below.

The Speaker and the committee system

• The Speaker constitutes all parliamentary committees of the Lok Sabha and appoints their chairpersons, which makes the composition of the scrutiny machinery an appointment in the gift of one person.
• Three committees are chaired by the Speaker personally:
  • The Business Advisory Committee, which allocates time to items of government business — effectively deciding how long a bill may be debated.
  • The Rules Committee, which considers amendments to the Rules of Procedure.
  • The General Purposes Committee, which advises on matters concerning the affairs of the House not falling within any other committee’s remit.
• The chairman of the Public Accounts Committee is appointed by the Speaker, and it is by the Speaker’s exercise of that power — not by any rule — that the convention of an opposition chairman has been maintained.

Which model? Britain, America and the Indian hybrid

Feature	British Commons	US House of Representatives	India
Party status	Speaker resigns party membership on election	Speaker is the leader of the majority party	No requirement to resign; remains a party member
Re-election	Contests as “the Speaker seeking re-election”; major parties do not oppose	Contests normally as a partisan	Contests on a party ticket against opposition candidates
Neutrality	Strict; does not speak or vote except by casting vote	Openly partisan, and expected to be	Expected but not required; expectation frequently disappointed
After office	Traditionally elevated to the House of Lords; does not return to party politics	Returns to party politics	Returns to party politics, often to a ministry or a governorship
Powers	Narrow — order and procedure	Wide — agenda, referral, floor control	Wide — admissibility, certification, disqualification, committees

• India took the American breadth of power and the British expectation of neutrality, and provided the institutional supports of neither.
  • The British Speaker is neutral because the cost of neutrality is removed: no party contest, no career afterwards to protect, and a peerage at the end.
  • The American Speaker is powerful because partisanship is admitted, and the system builds its checks elsewhere — in a separately elected executive and a co-equal Senate.
  • The Indian Speaker holds American powers while depending on a party for renomination and for a post-retirement future, which is precisely the combination that generates the controversies.
• A select committee of the House of Commons has recorded that even in Britain a Speaker could go partisan, that such a failure would sound the death knell of parliamentary democracy, and that the answer lies in guaranteeing the Speaker’s future — hence the recommendation of elevation to the House of Lords on retirement.
• G.V. Mavalankar, the first Speaker, set the early conventions by refusing government hospitality and declining to attend party meetings; the practice did not outlive the era of one-party dominance.

The Indian Speaker was given the powers of a partisan office and the duties of a neutral one, and asked to reconcile them with nothing but personal restraint.

The Speaker in practice: the record

The charge against the Indian Speaker is not that the office has been abolished but that it has been used. Every controversy below involves a Speaker exercising a power the Constitution genuinely confers, in circumstances where the exercise happened to serve the party that put him in the chair. That is what makes the problem hard: there is no illegality to strike down, only a discretion used in one direction.

Case studies of partisanship

• Luis Proto Barbosa, Goa (1990) — the limiting case. As Speaker of the Goa Legislative Assembly he resigned from the Congress, formed a new party with six other members, and became Chief Minister. The office had been used as a staging post to the executive.
• Nabam Rebia, Arunachal Pradesh (2015–16) — the Speaker disqualified fourteen ruling-party MLAs while a notice for his own removal was pending; the Deputy Speaker meanwhile revoked the disqualification. The Supreme Court’s Nabam Rebia judgment of 2016 restored the earlier position, held the Governor’s advancement of the Assembly session unconstitutional, and laid down that a Speaker facing a removal notice may not proceed to decide disqualification petitions.
• Karnataka (2019) — Speaker K.R. Ramesh Kumar disqualified seventeen Congress and Janata Dal (Secular) MLAs and purported to bar them from the House for the remainder of its term. In Shrimanth Balasaheb Patil the Supreme Court upheld the disqualifications but struck down the term-length bar, holding the Speaker has no power to fix the duration of a disqualification or to prevent a disqualified member from contesting a by-election.
• Manipur — a disqualification petition against a Congress MLA who had crossed to the treasury benches and taken a ministry lay undecided before the Speaker for close to three years, producing Keisham Meghachandra Singh in 2020.
• Maharashtra (2022–24) — the Shiv Sena split. Subhash Desai in 2023 held that the whip is appointed by the political party, not by the legislature party, that a legislature party has no existence independent of the political party except to plead a merger, and that treating legislative numbers as the test of which faction is the party would render the Tenth Schedule otiose. Speaker Rahul Narwekar nevertheless decided in January 2024 that the faction commanding the legislative majority was the real Shiv Sena, and declined to disqualify its members — reasoning that inverts the judgment it purports to apply.
• Telangana (2024–25) — ten legislators elected on one ticket crossed to the ruling party; the Speaker did not even issue notice for seven months.

Delay as the weapon

• The Tenth Schedule fixes no time limit, and the absence of a limit has become the substance of the law rather than a gap in it.
  • A petition undecided until the House’s term expires is a petition decided in the defector’s favour, without any decision being taken and therefore without anything for a court to review.
  • The defector meanwhile votes, holds office and draws the benefits of the crossing.
• In Padi Kaushik Reddy v. State of Telangana (July 2025) the Supreme Court fixed a three-month deadline for the Speaker to decide, and held squarely that a Speaker acting under the Tenth Schedule enjoys no constitutional immunity.

“Non-issuance of notice for a period of seven months … can be, by any stretch of imagination, envisaged as acting in an expeditious manner?” — Supreme Court of India, Padi Kaushik Reddy v. State of Telangana

• The Court warned against a result in which the “operation is successful but the patient died” — a disqualification pronounced after the term it was meant to affect has run out.
• The outcome in Telangana illustrates the limit of the remedy: in December 2025 the Speaker decided within the extended timetable and rejected the petitions against five of the legislators, holding the evidence of formal joining insufficient. A deadline disciplines the timing of a decision; it cannot discipline its content.

The removal resolution of 2026

• In March 2026 the Lok Sabha took up a resolution for the removal of Speaker Om Birla, moved by opposition members and admitted after more than fifty members rose in support.
  • The grounds alleged were partisan conduct of business and the treatment of the Leader of the Opposition during a debate on the President’s Address.
  • After a two-day debate the resolution was defeated by voice vote, the ruling coalition holding a comfortable majority in a House where removal requires a majority of all the then members.
• It was the fourth such resolution in the history of the Lok Sabha, following those against G.V. Mavalankar (1954), Hukam Singh (1966) and Balram Jakhar (1987), and the first in nearly four decades. All four failed.
• The episode exposed a second problem. Article 96 requires the Speaker not to preside, and Article 95(2) then hands the chair to the Deputy Speaker — but there was no Deputy Speaker.
  • A member of the panel of chairpersons, appointed by the very Speaker facing removal, presided instead, which the opposition argued cannot satisfy the constitutional design.
  • The three earlier resolutions were all presided over by an elected Deputy Speaker.
• The removal procedure is, on the arithmetic, unusable: a Speaker elected by the majority can only be removed by that same majority, which is why no resolution has ever succeeded.

The Deputy Speaker and the presiding officers of the Rajya Sabha

• Article 93 makes the election of a Deputy Speaker mandatory, in the same words and with the same urgency as the Speaker’s — “as soon as may be” — and Article 94 subjects the office to the same removal procedure.
• The office has been vacant since June 2019. The 17th Lok Sabha was the first to complete its full term without a Deputy Speaker, and the 18th Lok Sabha has not filled it either — a continuous vacancy of about seven years.
  • The convention since the 1990s was that the post went to the opposition or to an ally outside the principal ruling party; abandoning the convention has meant abandoning the office.
  • No provision fixes a deadline, and there is no petitioner with an obvious right to enforce the mandate, which is why an unambiguous constitutional command has gone unperformed for years.
• The Rajya Sabha is presided over differently. Its Chairman is the Vice-President of India ex officio under Article 89(1), is not a member of the House, and cannot be removed by it alone — removal is under Article 67(b), by a resolution of the Council of States passed by a majority of all the then members and agreed to by the House of the People, after fourteen days’ notice.
  • Since September 2025 the office of Vice-President and therefore of Chairman of the Rajya Sabha has been held by C.P. Radhakrishnan.
  • Because the Chairman is not elected by the House he presides over, he is structurally more insulated than the Speaker — and correspondingly less accountable to it.
• The Deputy Chairman is elected by the Rajya Sabha from among its members under Article 89(2), and is removable under Article 90 by a majority of all the then members on fourteen days’ notice.
  • Harivansh Narayan Singh was re-elected unopposed in April 2026 for a third consecutive term.
• The Rajya Sabha’s Chairman certifies nothing: money bill certification and the whole apparatus of financial procedure sit with the Speaker, which is why the two offices are not symmetrical despite the symmetry of the text.

Reforming the office of the Speaker

• Resignation from the party on election, as in Britain, with a statutory bar on rejoining. This is the single reform every commission has recommended and no government has moved.
• A guaranteed return: an unopposed re-election convention, or a nominated seat, or a defined post-retirement office, so that neutrality does not end a career.
• Transfer of the disqualification jurisdiction out of the office altogether — to a permanent tribunal, to the Election Commission, or to the President and Governor acting on the Commission’s advice.
• Reasoned and published orders on admissibility of motions and on privilege references, so that Article 122 protects procedure rather than concealing substance.
• Mandatory election of the Deputy Speaker within a fixed period of the House’s first sitting, and restoration of the convention that the post goes to the opposition.
• A panel of chairpersons drawn on the recommendation of all parties, rather than at the Speaker’s discretion, so that Article 96 has an answer when the Deputy Speaker’s chair is empty.

The anti-defection law: the problem it was meant to solve

Defection in a parliamentary system is not merely unattractive; it is destabilising in a specific way. Governments hold office by the confidence of the House, so a handful of crossings can end a ministry that an electorate installed. The 1967 general election broke Congress dominance in the states and produced coalition ministries with thin margins, and the crossings that followed became the defining scandal of Indian politics for a generation.

• “Aaya Ram Gaya Ram” entered political vocabulary from the conduct of Gaya Lal, a Haryana legislator who changed party three times within a fortnight in 1967.
• The harms were four, and they are distinct:
  • Instability — ministries brought down between elections by arithmetic the voter never authorised.
  • Corruption — office and money as the currency of crossing, since the party gaining a defector has every incentive to pay for him.
  • Breach of trust with the electorate — a voter who chose a party finds herself represented by another.
  • Executive dominance — the ruling party can hollow out an opposition by purchase rather than by argument.
• The Y.B. Chavan Committee on Defections, appointed after the 1967 wave, reported at the end of the decade and recommended restraints including a bar on defectors holding ministerial office.
  • Two constitutional amendment attempts followed and both failed — a bill introduced in 1973 lapsed, and a further attempt in 1978 was withdrawn.
• The eventual law came only when it suited the government of the day. The 52nd Amendment of 1985 was introduced by a ministry with an overwhelming majority that feared erosion from within — which explains why the statute is drafted to protect the party leadership rather than the individual legislator.

The Tenth Schedule: the scheme

• The 52nd Amendment Act, 1985 amended Articles 101, 102, 190 and 191 and inserted the Tenth Schedule, applying to both Houses of Parliament and to every state legislature.
• It reaches all members, including those holding the offices of Speaker, Deputy Speaker, Chairman and Deputy Chairman, and covers three categories of member with different rules for each.

Grounds of disqualification

• Members elected on a party ticket — Paragraph 2(1):
  • Voluntarily giving up membership of the party. In Ravi S. Naik the Supreme Court held the phrase is wider than formal resignation and may be inferred from conduct — speeches, public statements, appearing on another party’s platform.
  • Voting or abstaining contrary to a direction issued by the party, unless prior permission was obtained or the party condones the act within fifteen days.
• Independents — Paragraph 2(2): an independent member is disqualified if he joins any political party after the election. Joining is treated as a fraud on the voters who chose him precisely because he was unattached.
• Nominated members — Paragraph 2(3): a nominated member who was not a party member at nomination may join a party within six months of taking his seat; joining after six months disqualifies him. One who was already a party member at nomination is treated like an elected party member.
• Presiding officers — Paragraph 5: the Speaker, Deputy Speaker, Chairman and Deputy Chairman are exempted so far as is necessary to allow the office to be held neutrally.
  • Such a person may give up party membership on election to the office, and on ceasing to hold it may rejoin the original party or remain unattached — but may not join a different party, which would be a defection.

The exceptions: split and merger

• Paragraph 3 (split) protected a group amounting to not less than one-third of the legislature party. It was the loophole that made the law nearly useless: engineering a one-third break is easier than it sounds in small assemblies and in fragmented parties.
• Paragraph 4 (merger) protects a member where the original political party merges with another and not less than two-thirds of the members of the legislature party agree to the merger — or where the member and others opt to function as a separate group refusing the merger.
• The crucial drafting point, settled in Subhash Desai, is that Paragraph 4 speaks of the merger of the original political party, of which the two-thirds legislature-party consent is only a condition.
  • A defecting bloc that has the numbers but no organisational merger is claiming an exception the paragraph does not give.
  • This became live again when seven Rajya Sabha members of the Aam Aadmi Party were treated as having merged into the Bharatiya Janata Party in April 2026, with the party itself continuing in existence — and the correctness of that reading of Paragraph 4 is now before the Supreme Court.

Who decides

• Paragraph 6 vests the decision in the Chairman or Speaker of the House concerned, and declared the decision final. Where the question concerns the presiding officer himself, it is decided by a member elected by the House.
• Paragraph 7 attempted to exclude the jurisdiction of all courts, including under Articles 136, 226 and 227.
• Paragraph 8 empowers the presiding officer to make rules; in Ravi S. Naik those rules were held to be directory, so that breach is a procedural irregularity rather than a ground by itself for invalidating the order — while leaving the order open to challenge for mala fides and denial of natural justice.

The 91st Amendment, 2003

Change	Provision	Purpose
Split exception deleted	Paragraph 3 of the Tenth Schedule omitted	Closes the one-third loophole; only the two-thirds merger survives
Cabinet size capped	Article 75(1A) and 164(1A) — ministers not to exceed 15% of the House’s strength, with a floor of twelve in states	Removes the ministry as a currency for buying support
Disqualified members barred from office	Articles 75(1B) and 164(1B)	A member disqualified for defection cannot be appointed a minister
Remunerative political posts barred	Article 361B	A defector is disqualified from any remunerative political post under the Union or a state until his term expires or he is re-elected

• Article 361B is the sharpest of the four, because it attacks the incentive rather than the act: crossing is worth little if it cannot be cashed.
• The 15% cap has been evaded rather than obeyed. States have created large numbers of parliamentary secretaries, chief-ministerial advisers and chairmanships of boards and corporations, which are not ministries in name and therefore fall outside the count while delivering the same patronage.

Kihoto Hollohan and the judicial reconstruction of the Tenth Schedule

Kihoto Hollohan v. Zachillhu (1992) is the case that saved the anti-defection law by cutting the part of it that mattered most to its authors. A five-judge bench divided three to two, and both the majority and the minority have shaped everything since.

• Paragraph 7 was struck down. By ousting the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court under Article 136 and the High Courts under Articles 226 and 227, it altered Chapter IV of Part V and Chapter V of Part VI, and therefore required ratification by half the state legislatures under the proviso to Article 368(2), which had not been obtained.
• The rest of the Schedule was held severable and valid, so the law survived without its finality clause.
• The presiding officer was held to act as a tribunal, not as a legislature, when deciding a disqualification — which is why Article 122 immunity does not cover the decision, and why judicial review lies.
  • Review is available on jurisdictional error, violation of a constitutional mandate, mala fides, breach of natural justice, and perversity.
  • But there is no interference before a decision is made — no quia timet action, no injunction against the Speaker while the matter is pending. That single restraint is what made delay a viable strategy.
• The challenge based on freedom of speech failed. The majority held that Paragraph 2(1)(b) does not violate Articles 105 and 194, because a member elected on a party platform accepts the discipline that goes with it and the Schedule targets “unprincipled and unethical political defections”.
• The minority — Justices J.S. Verma and L.M. Sharma — would have struck down the entire Schedule for want of ratification, and doubted whether a Speaker dependent on a party majority could ever be an impartial adjudicator. Thirty years of case law has vindicated that doubt without adopting that conclusion.

The line of cases after Kihoto

Case	What it settled
Ravi S. Naik	“Voluntarily giving up membership” is wider than resignation and may be inferred from conduct; Paragraph 8 rules are directory
Rajendra Singh Rana (2007)	Failure to decide is itself reviewable; a Speaker who does not act within a reasonable time abdicates jurisdiction, and the Court may then decide the question itself
Nabam Rebia (2016)	A Speaker facing a notice for his own removal may not proceed to decide disqualification petitions — a holding referred to a larger bench in Subhash Desai
Shrimanth Balasaheb Patil (2019)	Disqualification upheld, but the Speaker has no power to fix its duration or bar a by-election; the Court recorded concern at Speakers acting on party considerations
Keisham Meghachandra Singh (2020)	Petitions should ordinarily be decided within three months; Parliament urged to substitute the Speaker with a permanent tribunal headed by a retired Supreme Court judge or High Court Chief Justice
Subhash Desai (2023)	The political party, not the legislature party, appoints the whip; legislative majority is not the test of which faction is the party; the Speaker must decide within a reasonable period
Padi Kaushik Reddy (2025)	A three-month deadline imposed on the Telangana Speaker; the Speaker has no constitutional immunity when acting as a Tenth Schedule tribunal

The Tenth Schedule did not abolish the market in legislators; it raised the minimum lot size from one to two-thirds and moved the transaction into the Speaker’s chamber.

What the Tenth Schedule did to the legislator

• It converted the member from a representative into a delegate of the party.
  • Article 105(1) guarantees freedom of speech in Parliament; the whip, backed by disqualification, makes that freedom unusable on any question the party has taken a position on.
  • The classic account of the legislator as owing the constituency his judgement and not merely his industry — Edmund Burke’s position — has no purchase in a system where a contrary vote costs the seat.
• It destroyed the backbench as a check. The historical discipline on a cabinet was the possibility that its own majority would desert it; removing that possibility removed the internal restraint and left the leadership unchecked from within.
• It made Parliament’s numbers static between elections, and therefore made floor debate consequence-free: no speech can change a vote whose direction was fixed before the debate began.
• The defence is real and should be stated. Governments no longer fall to purchased crossings in mid-term, states are not paralysed by weekly arithmetic, and the electorate’s verdict on which party should govern is broadly honoured for a full term.
• The honest verdict: it bought stability at the price of deliberation, and that the price was avoidable — the whip could have been confined to the votes on which stability actually depends.

Reforming the anti-defection law

• Confine the whip to survival questions. The Law Commission recommended that disqualification for defying a direction apply only to votes that decide whether the government stands — confidence and no-confidence motions, money bills and adjournment motions — leaving members free on all other legislation.
• Take the decision away from the Speaker.
  • The Dinesh Goswami Committee on Electoral Reforms recommended that the question be decided by the President or Governor acting on the binding advice of the Election Commission, the mechanism already used for other disqualifications under Articles 103 and 192.
  • The Election Commission has itself pressed for the same transfer.
  • Keisham Meghachandra proposed a permanent independent tribunal headed by a retired senior judge — an answer that removes the conflict of interest without relocating it to another political office.
• The National Commission to Review the Working of the Constitution recommended that defectors be barred from any ministerial or remunerative public office for the remainder of the term, that their votes not count towards the survival of a government, and that the exemptions be tightened.
• Statutory time limits with an automatic consequence — a decision within a fixed period, failing which the matter passes to the Election Commission or the High Court — because a deadline without a default rule is only a request.
• Redefine the merger exception so that Paragraph 4 requires a demonstrated merger of the original political party, evidenced by its own organisational decision, and not merely a two-thirds bloc of legislators asserting one.
• Delete the exception altogether, on the view that if defection by one is wrong, defection by two-thirds is only wrong on a larger scale.

Office of profit: the logic of the disqualification

The office-of-profit disqualification is the oldest of the four institutions considered here and the most thoroughly defeated. It survives in the text of two Articles, in a statute that exists mainly to create exceptions to it, and in a line of judicial tests refined over decades to decide questions that the legislature can render moot by amending a list.

• Article 102(1)(a) disqualifies a person from being chosen as, or being, a member of either House if he holds any office of profit under the Government of India or of any State, other than an office declared by Parliament by law not to disqualify. Article 191(1)(a) does the same for state legislatures, with the state legislature making the declaration.
• Two justifications sit behind the rule, and they are different in kind.
  • Separation of powers and conflict of interest — Parliament’s function is to hold the executive to account, and a member who owes the executive an office cannot perform it. The executive can otherwise buy a legislature office by office.
  • Undivided attention — a member’s constituents are entitled to his whole working time. The same premise explains the parallel privilege of freedom from arrest in civil matters during a session and for forty days before and after it, which exists so that the member’s parliamentary work is not interrupted.
• Article 103 provides that the question whether a member has become subject to a disqualification is decided by the President, who shall act according to the opinion of the Election Commission; Article 192 applies the same scheme to state legislatures with the Governor.
  • The Commission’s opinion is binding, so the President’s role is formal — which places a quasi-judicial determination in the hands of a body that also runs the elections the outcome affects.

The missing definition

• The Constitution does not define “office of profit”. It defines nothing about what an office is, what makes it profitable, or what makes it “under” a government.
• It does, however, exempt ministers by implication, because a parliamentary system requires ministers to be members — the very feature that makes the disqualification structurally awkward in India.
• The vacuum is filled by two things: a statute that lists exemptions, and a body of case law working out the tests from first principles. Neither supplies a definition; both supply answers case by case.

The Prevention of Disqualification Act, 1959 and the politics of exemption

• On the recommendation of a committee chaired by Pandit Thakur Das Bhargava, the Parliament (Prevention of Disqualification) Act, 1959 repealed the earlier Acts of 1950, 1951 and 1953 and consolidated the law.
• It does two things and only two:
  • It provides that an office whose holder receives only a compensatory allowance is not an office of profit.
  • It lists offices declared not to disqualify — and the list is the whole battleground.
• The Act has been amended repeatedly — in 1993, 2000, 2006 and 2013 — and every amendment has added offices to the exempt list, usually with retrospective effect to protect sitting members already holding them.
• The courts have upheld retrospective exemption, which produces the paradox that the legislature can lawfully validate the very holdings the disqualification was enacted to prevent.
• The cumulative effect is that so many offices are exempt that the disqualification has become largely nugatory — an obligation that binds only those whose party lacks the numbers to amend the list.

The 2006 controversy

• The controversy of 2006 made the pattern visible. Disqualification proceedings against sitting members over chairmanships of state councils and advisory bodies produced a resignation, a disqualification, and then a legislative rescue.
• Parliament passed an amendment bill exempting a long list of offices with retrospective effect from 1959.
• President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam returned the bill for reconsideration — one of the rare uses of the power under the proviso to Article 111.
• Parliament passed it again without change, and the President was then bound to assent. The episode is the clearest illustration of the constitutional weakness: the body whose members are disqualified is the body that decides what disqualifies.

Parliamentary secretaries and the Delhi episode

• The parliamentary secretary is the standard device. The post carries the functions and the standing of a junior minister without the label, and therefore evades both the office-of-profit disqualification and the 15% ceiling imposed by the 91st Amendment.
• Delhi, 2015–18: twenty-one legislators were appointed parliamentary secretaries; the Assembly amended its exemption law retrospectively; the President declined assent to the amendment; the Election Commission recommended disqualification and the President disqualified twenty members in January 2018.
• The Delhi High Court set the disqualification aside in March 2018, holding that the Commission had reached its opinion without a proper hearing on the merits, and remitted the matter. The disqualification never took effect.
• Enforcement has been wildly uneven. Several states have maintained parliamentary secretaries with no consequence at all, while identical posts elsewhere have triggered disqualification proceedings — a variation that owes more to political circumstance than to legal principle.

The judicial tests

Case	Test contributed
Ashok Kumar Bhattacharyya	The question is one of substance decided on facts and circumstances; the approach is practical, not pedantic
Shatrucharla Chandrashekhar Raju	The factors: who appoints, who can remove, who fixes the remuneration, whether the source is the public purse, who controls the performance of duties, and whether the office brings the holder under government patronage — not all need be present
Jaya Bachchan	It is enough that the office is capable of yielding profit; whether the holder actually drew anything is irrelevant
Kanta Kathuria	There must be an office existing independently of its holder; an ad hoc professional engagement is not an office
Shibu Soren	The inquiry is whether the payment is genuinely compensatory or brings the holder under the influence of government
Divya Prakash	An honorary appointment can still be an office of profit if the office is capable of yielding profit

• The five threshold questions distilled from this line are: is there an office; is it an office of profit; is it under a government; did the person hold it; and is it exempted by the legislature?
• A joint committee of both Houses on offices of profit, with fifteen members drawn from the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha, examines the composition of committees and bodies on which members serve. It applies two criteria: whether the remuneration exceeds a compensatory allowance, and whether the office brings the holder under government influence and patronage.

Does the disqualification make sense in a parliamentary system?

• The rule is coherent in a presidential system and incoherent in a parliamentary one, and this is the strongest critique of the Indian position.
  • Article I, Section 6 of the United States Constitution bars any person holding an office under the United States from being a member of either House while continuing in office — a clean separation, because the executive is separately elected and does not sit in the legislature.
  • In a parliamentary system the executive is drawn from the legislature. The Prime Minister leads both, ministers are members, and the ruling party’s backbenchers have no institutional interest in embarrassing a government headed by their own leader.
• The anti-defection law finishes the argument. A ruling-party member cannot vote against the government anyway, so removing his other emoluments does nothing to restore an independence the Tenth Schedule has already extinguished.
• The counter-argument deserves weight. The rule still bites on opposition members offered chairmanships to buy their silence, it still exposes the mechanics of patronage to public argument when a controversy erupts, and abolishing it would remove even the current, weak restraint.
• The realistic reform is either a comprehensive statutory definition with a prohibition on retrospective exemption, or a frank repeal accompanied by a hard, enforceable cap on all offices of patronage — but not the present arrangement, which keeps the form of a prohibition and none of its effect.

The British origin and the Chiltern Hundreds

• The disqualification is an inheritance from a specific English quarrel: the Crown’s practice of securing a Commons majority by distributing offices, pensions and sinecures to members.
• The Act of Settlement, 1701 contained a clause providing that no person holding an office or place of profit under the King could sit in the House of Commons — a blanket exclusion that would have made ministerial government impossible.
• Before it took effect it was replaced by the Succession to the Crown Act, 1707, which substituted a workable scheme: holders of certain offices could sit if re-elected after appointment, while newly created offices disqualified outright. Ministerial responsibility to the Commons was preserved.
• In modern Britain the disqualification survives mainly as a convenience. A member of the Commons cannot resign; to leave, he applies for the nominal office of Crown Steward and Bailiff of the Chiltern Hundreds or of the Manor of Northstead, which is an office of profit under the Crown and therefore vacates the seat.
• The rule created to keep the executive out of the legislature is now used chiefly to let members out of it — a fair measure of how far the original purpose has drained away in the country that invented it.

Parliamentary privileges: the constitutional scheme

Privileges exist because a legislature that can be sued or prosecuted for what it says cannot hold an executive to account. They are not perquisites of status but working conditions, and every democracy grants some version of them. The Indian difficulty is that the Constitution grants them by reference to an uncodified British practice, so that nobody — least of all a journalist or a citizen — can know in advance what conduct amounts to a breach.

“That the freedom of speech and debates or proceedings in Parliament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of Parliament.” — Bill of Rights, 1689

What Articles 105 and 194 contain

• Article 105(1) — freedom of speech in Parliament, subject to the Constitution and to the rules and standing orders regulating procedure. It is not the Article 19(1)(a) right; it is wider in the House and confined to it.
• Article 105(2) — no member is liable to any proceedings in any court in respect of anything said or any vote given by him in Parliament or any committee, and no person is liable in respect of the publication of any report, paper, votes or proceedings by or under the authority of a House.
• Article 105(3) — the other powers, privileges and immunities are such as Parliament may by law define, and until then those of the House and its members and committees as they existed immediately before the coming into force of the relevant provision of the 44th Amendment.
  • The original text referred expressly to the House of Commons of the United Kingdom; the reference was removed by amendment, but the substantive content is unchanged — the default remains the uncodified privileges of the Commons.
• Article 105(4) extends the same protections to persons entitled to speak in or take part in the proceedings without being members, such as a minister of the other House or the Attorney-General.
• Article 361A, inserted by the 44th Amendment, protects the publication in newspapers and broadcasts of substantially true reports of proceedings of either House, unless the publication is proved to have been made with malice.
• Freedom from arrest in civil matters derives not from Article 105 but from the Code of Civil Procedure: a member is free from arrest in a civil cause during the session and for forty days before and after it. It does not apply to criminal cases or to preventive detention.
• Article 122 — courts may not inquire into the validity of any proceeding in Parliament on the ground of irregularity of procedure, and officers vested with powers to regulate procedure are outside the jurisdiction of the courts in respect of that exercise. Article 212 does the same for state legislatures.

Individual, collective and committee privileges

• Individual privileges attach to the member: freedom of speech in the House, immunity from proceedings for what is said or voted, and freedom from arrest in civil matters.
• Collective privileges belong to the House: the power to publish or prohibit publication of its proceedings, to exclude strangers, to regulate its own internal affairs free of judicial interference, to receive immediate information of the arrest, detention or release of a member, and to punish for contempt.
• Committee privileges protect committees and their members in the same way, which is what allows a committee to summon witnesses and take evidence.
• Freedom of speech in the chamber is the one privilege every democracy grants, though its extent varies sharply.
  • The United States Senate’s filibuster is the extreme case: with no general limit on how long a senator may hold the floor, the privilege of speech becomes a power to block legislation outright.
  • The Indian position is the opposite — Article 105(1) makes the freedom subject to the rules and standing orders, and the Speaker’s control of time under the Business Advisory Committee means no member can speak beyond an allotted slot.
• The power to punish for contempt is the operative one, and it is the one with no defined boundary. A House may admonish, reprimand, or commit to prison, and it defines the offence itself.

Privileges against fundamental rights

Case	Holding
M.S.M. Sharma (Searchlight) (1959)	Privileges prevail over Article 19(1)(a); the House’s power to prohibit publication of expunged proceedings upheld; Article 21 satisfied because the House’s own procedure is “procedure established by law”
Keshav Singh (1965) — Special Reference	Article 21 applies to the House’s action; High Courts under Article 226 may examine a committal; the judiciary is not subordinate to the House; Searchlight on Article 19 left intact
Raja Ram Pal (2007)	Parliament has an inherent power to expel a member under Article 105(3); but Article 122 immunity covers procedural irregularity, not substantive illegality or unconstitutionality, so judicial review lies on those grounds
Amarinder Singh (2010)	A House may not exercise powers that are judicial in nature over matters outside its competence; expulsion for conduct unconnected with the House’s functioning was set aside

• The trajectory is a narrowing of the immunity, achieved not by codification but case by case.
  • Searchlight gave privileges primacy over the freedom of speech of a citizen; Keshav Singh carved out Article 21; Raja Ram Pal added Article 20 and, decisively, distinguished irregularity from illegality.
  • Article 19(1)(a) has still not been given primacy, which is why the press remains the most exposed party.
• The technique the courts use is harmonious construction — reading two provisions of the same Constitution so that both retain effect, rather than treating one as subordinate. Where harmony fails, the later cases have preferred the fundamental right over the privilege unless the privilege is genuinely necessary to the House’s functioning.

Bribery and immunity: from Narasimha Rao to Sita Soren

• P.V. Narasimha Rao (1998) arose from allegations that members were paid to vote against a no-confidence motion. A five-judge bench divided three to two.
  • The majority held that Article 105(2) immunity extended to a member who took a bribe and then voted as agreed, because the prosecution would require the vote to be questioned.
  • A member who took the bribe and did not vote enjoyed no immunity, because there was no vote to connect the bribe to.
  • The result was perverse on its face: the law rewarded the bribe-taker who delivered and punished the one who did not.
• Sita Soren v. Union of India (2024) overruled it. A seven-judge Constitution Bench, unanimous, delivered on 4 March 2024.
  • Bribery is not protected by Article 105(2) or Article 194(2). The offence is complete on the acceptance of the illegal gratification, independent of whether the member later speaks or votes as promised — so no privilege is invaded by the prosecution.
  • The Court laid down a two-fold test for any claimed privilege: it must be tethered to the collective functioning of the House, and it must be necessary for the discharge of the House’s essential functions. A privilege that fails both is not a privilege at all.
  • Immunity does not extend to voting in a Rajya Sabha election, which is not a proceeding in the House.
  • The Court noted that corruption in the legislature erodes responsible government and probity in public life and that an immunity for bribery has no place in a parliamentary democracy.
• The two cases arose from the same political milieu and even the same family — the 1998 case concerned the leader of a party, and the 2024 case his daughter-in-law — which is a neat illustration of how long a bad precedent can survive.

Sita Soren settled that privilege is a function, not a status: it protects what the House needs to do its work, and nothing beyond that.

The freedom of the press problem

• The press has the most to lose from an uncodified contempt power, and the least ability to predict it.
  • A newspaper cannot know in advance whether a critical report, a cartoon, or the publication of a committee’s unadopted draft will be treated as a breach.
  • The chilling effect operates before any proceeding is begun — the risk is enough.
• State legislatures have been the more aggressive users of the power. Journalists have been summoned, reprimanded and in some instances sentenced to imprisonment for reporting or commenting on legislators’ conduct, and in in 2018 an activist was taken into custody on a contempt finding by a state assembly over derogatory remarks — an outcome no British House has produced for well over a century.
• The comparison is unflattering in both directions.
  • The House of Commons has not imprisoned anyone for contempt since 1880, and defamatory statements about the House are no longer treated as a breach.
  • The United States Congress has no equivalent punitive practice: its privileges are similarly uncodified, but there is no system of punishing outsiders for contempt of the chamber.
• The judiciary is caught between two constitutional duties — as guardian of fundamental rights it must protect the citizen, and as interpreter of the text it must give effect to Article 105(3) — and that tension is precisely what codification would resolve.

Codification: the case for and against

The argument has been running since the Constituent Assembly and has never been resolved, because the body that would resolve it is the body that benefits from leaving it open. What has changed is that the costs are now borne visibly by identifiable people — journalists, commentators, citizens summoned before privilege committees — rather than absorbed as an abstraction.

• The case for:
  • It would fix the boundary between Articles 19, 20 and 21 and the privileges, ending the case-by-case balancing that leaves the press unable to plan.
  • It would restore the House’s dignity by removing the occasions for judicial intervention: a defined privilege is enforced, not litigated.
  • Uncodified privilege imports the British premise of parliamentary sovereignty into a system founded on constitutional supremacy — the House claiming the powers of a body that has no written constitution above it.
  • Members are representatives, and cannot coherently claim powers greater than those of the people who elected them.
  • Australia has done it, in the Parliamentary Privileges Act, 1987, which defines proceedings in Parliament, restricts the use of parliamentary material in court, and removed the power to expel members — proof that codification is workable in a Westminster system.
  • Rajendra Prasad urged codification in the Constituent Assembly, precisely because he suspected it would otherwise never be done. Seventy-five years later it has not been.
• The case against:
  • The classic reply, associated with British constitutional practice, is that the most valuable privilege of a legislature is not to codify its privileges — because a defined list is a list a court can shorten, and each definition invites litigation on its margins.
  • Codification would make the House’s powers justiciable in a way they presently are not, which some argue transfers a legislative self-governance question to the judiciary.
  • Parliament has no incentive to legislate away its own discretion, which is the real reason nothing has happened.
• The middle path worth arguing for: codify the penal privileges — what constitutes contempt, what punishment is available, what procedure and right of hearing apply — while leaving the functional immunities in their present form. The uncertainty that harms citizens lies almost entirely on the penal side.

The committee system: why committees exist

Committees are the answer to a structural problem. A chamber of hundreds sitting for a limited number of days cannot examine technical legislation in detail, cannot cross-examine officials, and cannot deliberate away from the cameras that make every exchange a performance. Committees do all three, and they continue working when the House is not in session.

“Congress in session is Congress on public exhibition, whilst Congress in its committee-rooms is Congress at work.” — Woodrow Wilson

The American and British models

• The United States has the strongest committee system anywhere, and it is strong because committees control the fate of legislation.
  • A bill is referred to committee before it is debated, and it can die there.
  • The pigeonhole practice — a committee simply declining to report a bill out — ends the bill without the chamber voting on it. Referral is therefore not a stage in the process; it is the process.
  • Committee chairmanships carry real power, and the seniority system historically gave chairmen independence from the party leadership.
• Britain developed the departmental select committees in 1979, one shadowing each government department, with the power to send for persons, papers and records.
  • Since 2010 select committee chairs have been elected by secret ballot of the whole House and members chosen by their party groups, which has visibly increased their independence of the whips.
• The Indian system took the British form — committees shadowing departments, examining demands for grants, taking evidence — without the American power to hold up a bill, and without, until recently, the British reforms that insulated committee leadership from party control.

The Indian architecture

Committee	Composition	Function
Public Accounts Committee (from 1921)	22 — 15 Lok Sabha, 7 Rajya Sabha; ministers ineligible	Examines the CAG’s audit reports and appropriation accounts; chaired by convention from the opposition since 1967
Estimates Committee (from 1950)	30, all from the Lok Sabha; ministers ineligible	Suggests economies in expenditure; a continuous economy committee
Committee on Public Undertakings (from 1964)	22 — 15 Lok Sabha, 7 Rajya Sabha	Examines the reports and accounts of public sector enterprises
Department-related standing committees (from 1993)	24 committees, 31 members each — 21 Lok Sabha and 10 Rajya Sabha; 16 serviced by the Lok Sabha Secretariat and 8 by the Rajya Sabha Secretariat; term of one year	Examine demands for grants, bills referred to them, annual reports and long-term policy
Select and joint committees	Ad hoc, constituted for a particular bill; joint committees draw from both Houses	Detailed clause-by-clause scrutiny of a specific bill, with public evidence
Committee on Subordinate Legislation	Separate committees in each House	Scrutinises whether delegated legislation stays within the powers conferred
Committee on Government Assurances	Separate committees in each House	Tracks whether assurances given by ministers on the floor are actually fulfilled
Committee on Petitions	Separate committees in each House	Examines petitions from citizens on bills and matters of general public interest
Committee of Privileges	Separate committees in each House	Examines questions of breach of privilege referred by the presiding officer
Ethics Committee (Rajya Sabha 1997, Lok Sabha 2000)	Separate committees in each House	Enforces the code of conduct for members
Business Advisory Committee	Chaired by the Speaker / Chairman	Allocates time for government business
Rules Committee	Chaired by the Speaker / Chairman	Considers amendments to the Rules of Procedure
Committee on Welfare of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes	Drawn from both Houses	Examines the working of reservation and welfare programmes
Committee on Empowerment of Women	30 members drawn from both Houses	Reviews measures for the status and dignity of women

• The classification that matters analytically is by function, not by name:
  • Financial committees — Public Accounts, Estimates, Public Undertakings — which work after the money is spent or on the estimates, and are the historical core of accountability.
  • Department-related standing committees — where scrutiny of bills and of demands for grants now actually lives.
  • Ad hoc committees — select and joint committees on individual bills, and inquiry committees.
  • Housekeeping committees — Rules, Business Advisory, General Purposes, Privileges, Ethics, Petitions, Assurances, Subordinate Legislation.
• The Public Accounts Committee’s opposition chairmanship is the single healthiest convention in Indian parliamentary practice — it has survived every change of government since 1967, and in the 18th Lok Sabha the chair has been held by a senior Congress member, reappointed for successive terms.
• Its Rajya Sabha members are associate members, a design detail that preserves the Lok Sabha’s primacy over finance while still drawing on the second chamber.

Why committees work

• They sit in camera. No cameras, no gallery, no clip for the evening bulletin — and therefore no incentive to perform. Members who cannot agree on the floor routinely agree in a committee room.
• The whip does not formally operate. A committee’s report is not a vote of confidence, so a member can dissent without triggering the Tenth Schedule. This is the deepest reason committees are the last surviving space for independent judgement in Indian legislative life.
• They can summon officials and take evidence. Secretaries to government, regulators, industry bodies, academics and civil society organisations appear and are questioned — the only routine mechanism by which Parliament reaches expertise outside itself.
• They work continuously. Committees meet through the year, including when the House is not sitting, which partly offsets the decline in sitting days.
• They mix the two chambers. Department-related standing committees carry 21 Lok Sabha and 10 Rajya Sabha members, and joint committees draw from both Houses.
  • This is the principal institutional site where the directly elected chamber and the chamber representing the states work on the same text, and it matters most on Concurrent List subjects, where a bill’s administration falls to the states.
  • Cross-pollination is structural to the committee design, not an incidental benefit — it is the one place where the bicameral character of Indian legislation is operationally, rather than sequentially, expressed.
• They produce a usable public record. A standing committee report on a bill is often the only detailed, non-partisan analysis of it in existence, and is relied on by courts, the press and the states.

Why they do not: the limits

Every advantage a committee has is discretionary at the other end. It can summon officials, but cannot compel action on what they say; it can produce the only detailed analysis of a bill in existence, and the House need never discuss it. The system was built with all the powers of examination and none of the powers of consequence.

• Recommendations are not binding. The government may accept, reject or ignore them, and there is no obligation to explain a rejection on the floor.
• Reports are frequently not discussed. A report laid on the table and never taken up has no political consequence at all, which reduces committee work to a documentary exercise.
• Attendance is poor. Quorum failures and thin meetings are routine, and there is no sanction.
• Membership rotates annually, so a member who has spent a year learning a sector is moved out of it. Expertise cannot accumulate, which is the opposite of the reason committees exist.
• There is no research support. Members have no dedicated professional staff of the kind available to legislators in comparable democracies, and must rely on the ministry they are scrutinising for information.
• There is no additional remuneration and no career benefit. Committee work is invisible to voters and irrelevant to a member’s prospects within the party, so the incentive to do it well is entirely personal.
• Ministers are excluded from the financial committees and from the department-related standing committees, which preserves independence but also means the committee’s findings never engage the person who could act on them.
• The executive can bypass the system entirely. Reference of a bill to a committee is at the discretion of the presiding officer, ordinarily on the government’s request — and no rule compels it.
• Pratap Bhanu Mehta and Devesh Kapur have argued that committees inherit rather than cure Parliament’s general infirmities — limited member capacity, weak institutional memory, and the absence of any reward for careful legislative work.

The falling proportion of bills referred

• The trend across five Lok Sabhas is the clearest single measure of the decline in scrutiny:
  • 14th Lok Sabha — about 60% of bills referred to committees.
  • 15th Lok Sabha — about 71%, the high-water mark.
  • 16th Lok Sabha — about 28%.
  • 17th Lok Sabha — about 16%, of 179 bills passed.
  • 18th Lok Sabha — lower still: only seven bills were referred to standing committees in the whole of 2025, and none at all during the 2026 monsoon session.
• The compression of the legislative timetable tells the same story from another angle.
  • 34 of 64 bills — 53% — in the 18th Lok Sabha have been passed in the very session in which they were introduced, against 33% in the 16th Lok Sabha.
  • In the 2026 monsoon session, eleven of twelve bills were introduced and passed in the same session, seven of eleven passed in five minutes or less, and nine passed with no member other than the piloting minister speaking.
  • Median debate time on a bill has fallen from about six hours in 2024 to under two and a half hours in 2026.
• A bill neither referred to a committee nor debated has been enacted without scrutiny of any kind — and the reference decision, not the debate, is where the loss occurs, because the committee is the only stage capable of detailed examination.

The reform agenda for committees

• Mandatory reference of every bill above a defined threshold — or of every bill, with a stated exception for urgent and non-controversial measures certified as such.
• A government obligation to respond, in writing and within a fixed period, to every recommendation it declines to accept, with the response laid before the House.
• Longer tenures — three years rather than one — so that specialisation is possible.
• Professional research staff attached to each committee, independent of the ministries being scrutinised.
• Scheduled discussion of committee reports on the floor, so that the work has a political consequence.
• Elected chairs, on the British model, and extension of the opposition-chairmanship convention beyond the Public Accounts Committee to a defined set of scrutiny committees.
• Publication of attendance records, so that participation carries a reputational cost.
• Post-legislative scrutiny — a standing mandate to examine whether an enacted law achieved what it promised, which no Indian committee presently performs systematically.

Conclusion

The four institutions examined here were the working parts of the parliamentary machine, and each has failed in the same way: a power granted without a constraint, resting on a convention that competitive politics has dissolved.

• The Speaker retains every formal guarantee of independence and none of the political conditions for it.
• The Tenth Schedule ended defection by the individual and licensed it by the bloc, handing adjudication to the one officer with the strongest reason not to adjudicate.
• Privileges meant to shield the legislature from the executive are now aimed mainly at the press.
• Committees work exactly as designed, and are used less every year.
• The repairs are known, modest and unlegislated, which is itself the finding.
  • A Speaker who resigns the party and has a guaranteed future; a permanent tribunal for disqualification with an enforceable deadline; a whip confined to survival votes; codified penal privileges; and compulsory reference of bills to committees.
• None of these requires a new theory of parliamentary government — each merely supplies the constraint the original design assumed would be supplied by restraint.
• The direction of judicial travel is corrective and insufficient. Kihoto Hollohan restored review, Keisham Meghachandra proposed a tribunal, Sita Soren removed an immunity for bribery, Padi Kaushik Reddy imposed a deadline — and a Speaker who decides within the deadline on the merits he prefers is beyond all of them.
• The institution that must legislate the fix is the one it would constrain, which is the honest reason nothing has moved in four decades — and the reason each of these questions returns.