Power over principle

The prime minister and the Speaker must act more responsibly to maintain the parliament’s sanctity.

A robust national legislature where people’s representatives deliberate on key national issues and pass relevant bills is perhaps the best indicator of a functioning democracy. This is even more the case in a parliamentary democracy where the parliament elects the prime minister, and thus provides a vital check on executive power. But the system works only if members of all three organs of the state accept and internalise the ‘parliamentary supremacy’. This sense of responsibility is most essential in the prime minister, the executive head. In our system, whoever has the majority in the legislature forms the government and so the prime minister, as government head, enjoys enormous potential leverage over the parliament’s functioning. By the same token, there is a big room for abuse of power by getting the legislature to do the executive’s bidding. There have of late been some troubling hints that Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli is on this latter path. For instance, the Federal Civil Service Bill that was to be tabled in parliament after its passage by the relevant parliamentary sub-committee mysteriously disappeared from the House agenda. Speaker Dev Raj Ghimire seems to have removed it at the urging of Oli, chief of the CPN-UML, his former party.