D. N. Bezboruah
For the best part of the last four decades, our elected leaders — our lawmakers — have been living in clover. Whether you look at their free official residences in New Delhi, their almost limitless free travel and free telephone calls, the 2,000 kilolitres of free potable water and 75,000 units of electrical power every year they are entitled to or their other allowances and perquisites, our MPs are better off than even some of the leading industrialists in the country, not counting the Ambani brothers and others of their ilk. Given this kind of scenario, it is pointless to ask about their actual salaries. They have kept it low because of the amount spent on them by what is made to look like a doting country. When you have the public exchequer spending a few crores on every MP every year, it makes no sense to ask what their monthly salaries are. They just have a happy situation of allowances and perquisites being far in excess of actual salaries. What better direct tax arrangement could one think of?
In 1985, when the Congress won a thumping majority, the government raised the salary of MPs to Rs 1,000 a month. That was the beginning of several hikes in the pay of MPs – to Rs 1,500 in 1988 and to Rs 4,000 in 1998 before being trebled to Rs 12,000 in 2001 by the Vajpayee government. In 2006, the monthly salary rose again to Rs 16,000. The constituency allowance too rose from Rs 10,000 a month to Rs 20,000. On top of this, there is a daily allowance of Rs 1,000 when Parliament is in session. There was a plan to hike the salaries, allowances and perquisites of MPs this year too when the move was abandoned with Sonia Gandhi asking her ministers and MPs to take a pay cut of 20 per cent due to the threat of drought and the gloomy economic outlook. And that is when austerity suddenly became a major status symbol. But MPs who were all set to take a sizeable hike in their pay and allowances, suddenly also realized that they might save themselves from the 20 per cent pay cut if they just kept quiet and did not demand any hikes. I would rather come back to the question of austerity as fashion a little later after I have dealt with a few issues relating to extravagance and criminal waste that deserve to be taken up earlier. After all, issues of ethics and propriety deserve priority over a mere matter of transient fashion.
I said earlier that our MPs are among the three or four groups of public servants elsewhere in the world who manage to fix their own salaries, allowances and perquisites from time to time. I cannot recall the other countries where lawmakers, who ought to be the models of honesty, probity and propriety, also decide on their own emoluments. But there must be at least one banana republic in the group like Haiti and two or three of the most corrupt countries in the world like Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan and, of course, our own India. There are several things wrong about our lawmakers deciding what their own pay, allowances and perquisites should be, because for every other category of public servant in the country we have some kind of a pay commission that periodically decides what the salaries and allowances of public servants and other government employees ought to be. True, not everyone is happy with the decisions of these pay commissions, but the differences are sorted out through representations and negotiations, and government employees and public servants in India have generally accepted the recommendations of pay commissions over the years with good grace. The pay commissions examine all relevant aspects of every job like requisite educational qualifications, the number of years of study required, the occupational hazards of any job, the age of retirement, the qualifying years of service for being entitled to pension benefits and so on. Now look how things are with our lawmakers. There is no set educational qualification for MPs, even though some of them are highly educated. It makes a lot of sense to stipulate a minimum educational qualification for our MPs if they are to be efficient representatives of their electorates. An MP earns a lifelong pension for having completed just one term of five years in Parliament. Any other government employee needs to put in 33 years of service in order to qualify for a full pension. There is a retirement age for every government employee. There is none for governors, ministers and MPs. This is the height of inequity. It is in this context that the arrogance of MPs determining their own salary, allowances and perquisites seems most intolerable.
What is most intriguing in all this business is the series of highly irregular processes that enable just one group of public servants to determine their own salaries, allowances and perquisites; the qualifications for their life-long pensions; and the number of members of the family or the number of attendants who can travel as their attendants. For 19 years, from 1964 to 1983, the salaries of MPs remained unchanged at Rs 750 a month. I am not suggesting this was a good thing to have happened. Such decisions should be determined by the consumer price index. But perhaps the MPs of those days made a virtue out of austerity just as today’s politicians tend to make a virtue out of other people’s poverty. But it did not take long for the ideal of tyaag (renunciation) to be totally hijacked by the far more interesting principle of bhog (enjoyment) which is the hallmark of today’s politician. Today’s politician is no politician at all if he does not think of his own interest first and then his party’s interest and turns his back on his country and countrymen. This breed of politicians does not talk about austerity. This breed of politicians has turned the art of living off the fat of the land into a fine art. In fact, it regards the ability to waste public money as a status symbol. A minister thinks nothing of commandeering vehicles for private use from public sector undertakings. He should have been a minister in a country like Sweden where he would have been merely told which car he could pick up from the car pool and drive himself when he wanted transport for his official work. For his personal work and for ferrying his children to school or to birthday parties he would have had to use his own car. It is only in India that a governor can invite more than 70 of his relatives from his home State for his swearing-in ceremony in another State and expect the State where he is being posted to foot all the bills.
To this lot of greedy politicians three things happened almost synchronously this year. There were the parliamentary elections, there was a global meltdown in national economies and there was the fear of a terrible drought in India. This fear has only been partly allayed by the monsoon shortfall turning out to be a little less severe than it was expected to be. So quite rationally, the Indian National Congress, heading a coalition government at the Centre for the second successive term, decided it ought to put out all the right signals to indicate that it was both a responsible and responsive government. One of the first things to do was to moot an austerity drive. The first person to suggest it was Congress president Sonia Gandhi. She not only proposed the 20 per cent cut in the salaries of ministers and MPs that I referred to earlier but also set an example by flying Economy class.
There are two things to be noted here. The first is that this gesture may well have been a reaction to the ostentation demonstrated in External Affairs Minister S.M.Krishna and his junior minister Sashi Tharoor choosing to live in expensive hotels because their allotted accommodations did not match their expectations. Krishna’s hotel bills came to well over a lakh of rupees a day and Tharoor’s was a more modest amount of just over Rs 60,000 a day! As soon as this was discovered, both ministers claimed that they were paying their own hotel bills. Krishna claimed he was getting hefty discounts through his platinum credit cards and certain other discounts wangled by his businessman son-in-law. I for one have reasons to be fairly convinced that the hotels bills would have been passed on to the ministry had this extravagance not been discovered and rightly condemned. Be that as it may, just a few days later Sonia Gandhi flew economy class and set the first significant example in austerity for Congressmen. There is a reason for calling this the first significant example in austerity because for Congressmen examples set by native leaders like Pranab Mukherjee and Mamata Banerji do not count. Examples set by the leader from Italy who condescended to become a bahu of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty alone count. These alone can set a fashion. And behold what happens! A Congressman in the Business class of the same flight changes places with someone from the Economy class because it would be a sacrilege to fly Business class when his leader from Italy was travelling Economy class on the same flight. So austerity has become a short-lived fashion. It is bound to be short-lived because how can ministers and MPs travel together with the hoi polloi for ever? And has not the highly educated and erudite Sashi Tharoor called the Economy class the “Cattle class” thereby reducing thousands of his compatriots who travel Economy to four-legged creatures with tails? Whether he has also degraded the Congress president with this nomenclature is something that Congressmen must decide. But for most of us who have been turned into quadrupeds, it is time to ask what the junior Foreign Minister’s education is worth if it gives him nothing better than arrogance at every step. THE SENTINEL
For the best part of the last four decades, our elected leaders — our lawmakers — have been living in clover. Whether you look at their free official residences in New Delhi, their almost limitless free travel and free telephone calls, the 2,000 kilolitres of free potable water and 75,000 units of electrical power every year they are entitled to or their other allowances and perquisites, our MPs are better off than even some of the leading industrialists in the country, not counting the Ambani brothers and others of their ilk. Given this kind of scenario, it is pointless to ask about their actual salaries. They have kept it low because of the amount spent on them by what is made to look like a doting country. When you have the public exchequer spending a few crores on every MP every year, it makes no sense to ask what their monthly salaries are. They just have a happy situation of allowances and perquisites being far in excess of actual salaries. What better direct tax arrangement could one think of?
In 1985, when the Congress won a thumping majority, the government raised the salary of MPs to Rs 1,000 a month. That was the beginning of several hikes in the pay of MPs – to Rs 1,500 in 1988 and to Rs 4,000 in 1998 before being trebled to Rs 12,000 in 2001 by the Vajpayee government. In 2006, the monthly salary rose again to Rs 16,000. The constituency allowance too rose from Rs 10,000 a month to Rs 20,000. On top of this, there is a daily allowance of Rs 1,000 when Parliament is in session. There was a plan to hike the salaries, allowances and perquisites of MPs this year too when the move was abandoned with Sonia Gandhi asking her ministers and MPs to take a pay cut of 20 per cent due to the threat of drought and the gloomy economic outlook. And that is when austerity suddenly became a major status symbol. But MPs who were all set to take a sizeable hike in their pay and allowances, suddenly also realized that they might save themselves from the 20 per cent pay cut if they just kept quiet and did not demand any hikes. I would rather come back to the question of austerity as fashion a little later after I have dealt with a few issues relating to extravagance and criminal waste that deserve to be taken up earlier. After all, issues of ethics and propriety deserve priority over a mere matter of transient fashion.
I said earlier that our MPs are among the three or four groups of public servants elsewhere in the world who manage to fix their own salaries, allowances and perquisites from time to time. I cannot recall the other countries where lawmakers, who ought to be the models of honesty, probity and propriety, also decide on their own emoluments. But there must be at least one banana republic in the group like Haiti and two or three of the most corrupt countries in the world like Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan and, of course, our own India. There are several things wrong about our lawmakers deciding what their own pay, allowances and perquisites should be, because for every other category of public servant in the country we have some kind of a pay commission that periodically decides what the salaries and allowances of public servants and other government employees ought to be. True, not everyone is happy with the decisions of these pay commissions, but the differences are sorted out through representations and negotiations, and government employees and public servants in India have generally accepted the recommendations of pay commissions over the years with good grace. The pay commissions examine all relevant aspects of every job like requisite educational qualifications, the number of years of study required, the occupational hazards of any job, the age of retirement, the qualifying years of service for being entitled to pension benefits and so on. Now look how things are with our lawmakers. There is no set educational qualification for MPs, even though some of them are highly educated. It makes a lot of sense to stipulate a minimum educational qualification for our MPs if they are to be efficient representatives of their electorates. An MP earns a lifelong pension for having completed just one term of five years in Parliament. Any other government employee needs to put in 33 years of service in order to qualify for a full pension. There is a retirement age for every government employee. There is none for governors, ministers and MPs. This is the height of inequity. It is in this context that the arrogance of MPs determining their own salary, allowances and perquisites seems most intolerable.
What is most intriguing in all this business is the series of highly irregular processes that enable just one group of public servants to determine their own salaries, allowances and perquisites; the qualifications for their life-long pensions; and the number of members of the family or the number of attendants who can travel as their attendants. For 19 years, from 1964 to 1983, the salaries of MPs remained unchanged at Rs 750 a month. I am not suggesting this was a good thing to have happened. Such decisions should be determined by the consumer price index. But perhaps the MPs of those days made a virtue out of austerity just as today’s politicians tend to make a virtue out of other people’s poverty. But it did not take long for the ideal of tyaag (renunciation) to be totally hijacked by the far more interesting principle of bhog (enjoyment) which is the hallmark of today’s politician. Today’s politician is no politician at all if he does not think of his own interest first and then his party’s interest and turns his back on his country and countrymen. This breed of politicians does not talk about austerity. This breed of politicians has turned the art of living off the fat of the land into a fine art. In fact, it regards the ability to waste public money as a status symbol. A minister thinks nothing of commandeering vehicles for private use from public sector undertakings. He should have been a minister in a country like Sweden where he would have been merely told which car he could pick up from the car pool and drive himself when he wanted transport for his official work. For his personal work and for ferrying his children to school or to birthday parties he would have had to use his own car. It is only in India that a governor can invite more than 70 of his relatives from his home State for his swearing-in ceremony in another State and expect the State where he is being posted to foot all the bills.
To this lot of greedy politicians three things happened almost synchronously this year. There were the parliamentary elections, there was a global meltdown in national economies and there was the fear of a terrible drought in India. This fear has only been partly allayed by the monsoon shortfall turning out to be a little less severe than it was expected to be. So quite rationally, the Indian National Congress, heading a coalition government at the Centre for the second successive term, decided it ought to put out all the right signals to indicate that it was both a responsible and responsive government. One of the first things to do was to moot an austerity drive. The first person to suggest it was Congress president Sonia Gandhi. She not only proposed the 20 per cent cut in the salaries of ministers and MPs that I referred to earlier but also set an example by flying Economy class.
There are two things to be noted here. The first is that this gesture may well have been a reaction to the ostentation demonstrated in External Affairs Minister S.M.Krishna and his junior minister Sashi Tharoor choosing to live in expensive hotels because their allotted accommodations did not match their expectations. Krishna’s hotel bills came to well over a lakh of rupees a day and Tharoor’s was a more modest amount of just over Rs 60,000 a day! As soon as this was discovered, both ministers claimed that they were paying their own hotel bills. Krishna claimed he was getting hefty discounts through his platinum credit cards and certain other discounts wangled by his businessman son-in-law. I for one have reasons to be fairly convinced that the hotels bills would have been passed on to the ministry had this extravagance not been discovered and rightly condemned. Be that as it may, just a few days later Sonia Gandhi flew economy class and set the first significant example in austerity for Congressmen. There is a reason for calling this the first significant example in austerity because for Congressmen examples set by native leaders like Pranab Mukherjee and Mamata Banerji do not count. Examples set by the leader from Italy who condescended to become a bahu of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty alone count. These alone can set a fashion. And behold what happens! A Congressman in the Business class of the same flight changes places with someone from the Economy class because it would be a sacrilege to fly Business class when his leader from Italy was travelling Economy class on the same flight. So austerity has become a short-lived fashion. It is bound to be short-lived because how can ministers and MPs travel together with the hoi polloi for ever? And has not the highly educated and erudite Sashi Tharoor called the Economy class the “Cattle class” thereby reducing thousands of his compatriots who travel Economy to four-legged creatures with tails? Whether he has also degraded the Congress president with this nomenclature is something that Congressmen must decide. But for most of us who have been turned into quadrupeds, it is time to ask what the junior Foreign Minister’s education is worth if it gives him nothing better than arrogance at every step. THE SENTINEL
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