The government will have to consult people before making a law, if a proposal from the national advisory council (NAC) is implemented. While it will be a revolutionary measure and make democracy meaningful, details of the consultation mechanism are not clear yet.

In its meeting on April 26, the NAC, headed by Congress president Sonia Gandhi, approved a draft pre-legislative process (PLP) for mandatory consultation with citizens before a law is put in place, Business Standard has reported

Aruna Roy, a member of NAC and convener of the Working Group on Transparency, Accountability and Governance, presented draft recommendations of the group on “pre-legislative process” to the council.

NAC said in a statement  that:

“5. The scope of the pre-Legislative process in respect of central government to extend to:

New laws and amendments to laws

New rules and amendments to rules

“6. Mode of implementation of pre-legislative process envisages that an executive order be issued requiring all central ministries to follow the pre-legislative process before a legislation is introduced in parliament/amendment to law/formulation of rules/amendments to existing rules. The guidelines should provide for desirable modes of disclosure and consultations, while details of such processes may be left to be worked out by the central ministries/departments concerned. The pre-legislative process should also adhere to the principles such as a) transparency, b) inclusiveness and c) equity.

“7. The draft recommendations of the working group will shortly be placed in public domain for comments before they are finalised and communicated to the government.”

Coming from Aruna Roy, who has been credited with pushing the RTI revolution through, the proposal for a pre-legislative process is truly people-centric and aimed at deepening Indian democracy. No doubt about that. Doubts, however, remain if this is one of those “wishy-washy ideas from the club of do-gooders”.

It’s difficult to imagine a government with guts to put it into practice.

Also, we will have to await the details. Consulting people need not mean actually consulting you and me. It can be on the lines of “comments invited” advertisements from parliamentary committees, or the people’s participation in the planning process — the planning commission did hold consultations but with NGOs. One can understand logistic problems. The one genuine consultation that was done was in the case of moratorium on GM foods — then environment minister Jairam Ramesh held public hearings in various places across the country.

Imagine public hearings across the country on the Lokpal bill!

If anything, the NAC proposal underlines the fact that there is no direct people’s participation in the law-making process. We the people vote for our representatives, and that vote is based on a variety of criteria (from the candidate’s accessibility to the party’s ideology). But after that, we are no longer in the picture.

Indeed, even our representative, MP or MLA, is also not much in the picture either, even if he or she is from the ruling party. For the next five years, law-making is in the hands of the few who call the shots in the government and the ruling party. Number strength is the only limit placed on them.

It is assumed that political parties reflect people’s wishes, if not in short term then at least over a long period. But that is a naïve assumption, as borne out by the decades-old Lokpal episode. As NAC has proposed, there is a need to bring people’s participation in law-making, even if in a logistically feasible, truncated manner.

And even that will not be we the people lawmakers — the way our counterparts are in Switzerland, where a certain number of signatures on a petition can create a bill. Still, for a beginning, the NAC proposal is not a bad idea.