Unparliamentary Privilege

On 15 July 2014, during the budget session of the Rajya Sabha, the Bharatiya Janata Party government was trying to pass an ordinance to amend the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India Act. Mani Shankar Aiyar, a member of parliament from the Congress, got up to speak, and alleged that the amendment was being proposed in order to appoint “one single person” to the staff of the prime minister.

He said that the BJP had been constantly adopting the ordinance route, and was bypassing “propriety, procedure and precedent,” describing the ruling party’s reasons for amending the act as “nonsense.” At this, the House broke into murmurs, and PJ Kurien, the deputy chairman of the Rajya Sabha, interrupted Aiyar. “‘Nonsense.’ Is it unparliamentary or parliamentary?” he asked his staff. Aiyar responded, “Sir… I am happy to withdraw it. The point I am trying to make is that…” An official of the Parliament Security Services hurriedly brought a book to the deputy chairman’s chair.

Aiyar continued his speech, “I know he is a new boy and though he will get away with it ...” Now the parliament became noisy, and shouts of protest could be clearly heard. Ravi Shankar Prasad, then the union law minister, stood up from his seat and, addressing Kurien, said, “Sir, he called the PM a ‘new boy.’ It is not fair.” Members raised their voices, indignant over the perceived insult to the prime minister. “He cannot say anything,” shouted one member. Aiyar said, “No, sir. I refuse to yield.” The deputy chairman tilted the four microphones on his desk and announced, “That is expunged … ‘new boy’ is expunged.”

The expressions “new boy” and “nonsense,” which were both expunged from the official record of the day’s proceedings, made their way into the 2014 edition of the book Unparliamentary Expressions, first published by the Lok Sabha secretariat in 1986. According to the detailed preface of its 2009 edition, the book “contains words and expressions declared unparliamentary in the Central Legislative Assembly, Constituent Assembly of India (Legislative), Provisional Parliament, First to Thirteen Lok Sabha (1952 to 2003) Rajya Sabha and State Legislatives in India and some of the Commonwealth Parliaments including the British House of Commons.”

According to the Rules of Procedure and Conduct of Business in the Lok Sabha, “the Speaker is vested with the power to order expunction of words which, in his opinion, are defamatory or indecent or unparliamentary or undignified from the proceedings of the House.” The terms declared unparliamentary in the book are forbidden from use in the parliament. Thus, many politicians use this as a tool to derail discussion or disrupt opponents’ speeches.

Some of the words, when directed against others as insults, are purely invectives, and their inclusion makes sense: “man-eater,” “mad dog,” “Pakistani agent,” “psychopath,” “nitwit” and so on. Similar Hindi words include “chutiya”—moron—“harami”—bastard—“bhadua”—pimp. The word “balatkari,” or rapist, has been recorded as having been used eight times in the various assemblies of the country.

But the presence of other words in the book is perplexing. “Honesty” has been declared unparliamentary in multiple instances. One cited comment, expunged from the Lok Sabha record, reads, “Honesty is no where near the mark as far as these gentlemen opposite are concerned.” “Speech” made its way into the book when one member described another’s address as “pro-American speech.”

Thus, what is deemed unparliamentary can often be arbitrary. “I think the situation is extremely confused,” Mani Shankar Aiyar told us at his Jangpura residence. The Congress politician is frequently accused of having used unparliamentary language. “I have rarely made a speech either in the Lok Sabha or in the Rajya Sabha when the chairman hasn’t felt obliged to expunge at least half a dozen words,” he said. Once, when Arun Jaitley kept interrupting him, he described the actions as an “orgy of disruption,” and the words were expunged. “Had I meant ‘sexual orgy,’ I could understand it being deleted,” he said.

Aiyar added that a “lot of words that are used freely in Hindi are not allowed in English, like sometimes there are words in English that are not allowed in Hindi.”

In October, we met the parliamentarian Sitaram Yechury at the Delhi office of his party, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPM. According to Yechury, “whenever an opponent is grilled to the wall, one standard recourse that is taken to is pick up some word that I have used and say that it is unparliamentary.” This happened once when he argued in the parliament that the Rajya Sabha can act as a check on the Lok Sabha. “I said Lok Sabha cannot exercise its tyranny of the majority,” he said. “They objected that the word ‘tyranny’ is unparliamentary.”

Yechury said that Unparliamentary Expressions “is not of great relevance today,” because many of its expressions are “from the colonial era.” It is very unscientific, he said, to censor based on standards that were considered unparliamentary one century ago. “Forty years ago, if you would say I was at a gay party, it would have meant gaiety. Today if you say so, the contexts are changing.”

Aiyar brought up the objection to the word “fascist,” which has been expunged at least eight times, according to the book. He said it was the British who first declared the word unparliamentary. But for the modern Indian state, he argued, “we didn’t fight in the Second World War and we were not invaded by slobs claiming to be fascists,” he said. “I see no reason ‘fascism’ or ‘fascist’ could not be used in our country.”

Santa Kumar, a former BJP MP, disagreed. “The word ‘fascist’ has a specific meaning, and the meaning is not considered good. So the tradition of prohibiting its use should continue,” he told us over the phone.

At the end of my interview with Aiyar, we asked him if a particular parliamentarian would be a good interviewee on this subject. He promptly replied that the person is discreet, and “the most colourless human being I have seen.” And the word “colourless,” he dead-panned, is unparliamentary.