Editorial: Separating substance and procedure

Chennai

The uproar that attended the passage of two of three Farm Bills was a regretful mix of hypocrisy and high-handedness. The former was on naked display by a section of the Opposition parties, which were overeager to misrepresent the Bills and attempt to stoke irrational fears among the farming community. The latter was demonstrated, in a stark and uncompromising manner, by the BJP-led government, leading to their messy and contentious passage.

Nobody has come off looking any better in this ugly episode, but the substantive issue about the Bills themselves first. The last party that should be protesting about this is the Congress, which proposed abolishing the APMC Act and freeing agricultural produce from existing restrictions in its 2019 election manifesto. All that the Bills have done is to remove the compulsion to sell farm produce to licenced APMC agents and give farmers the option of entering into contracts with agri-business firms on pre-agreed prices for their produce.

The fear that MSP procurement – on the specious ground that the Bills make no mention of its continuance - is a red herring. The Bills have no connection with MSP and the Centre’s promises that such procurement will not be abandoned, coupled with its attempt to assuage protests by hiking MSP price of wheat by 2.6 per cent a few days ago, have made no impact in this politically partisan uproar.

That the farm sector, which employs almost 50 per cent of the country’s workforce while producing only about one-sixth of its GDP, requires urgent and thoroughgoing reform is hardly in doubt. The issue of course is how such reforms must be implemented in a country, where the agricultural sector has traditionally been treated with great sensitivity. The first thing to remember is that the three Bills were issued in the form of ordinances. Since they are even remotely connected to the COVID-19 pandemic, the issue that they were pushed through to evade public and parliamentary scrutiny became an inevitable part of the discourse.

The refusal to refer them to a standing committee is one thing, but what was most unacceptable was the Rajya Sabha Deputy Chairman’s denial of a division of votes, which is impossible to defend. It is true that such a demand was pressed when the House was not in order, but procedure should always weigh in favour of perceived fairness rather than summary haste. It is also true that Opposition MPs behaved abominably and that their unruly behaviour needs to be firmly criticised. Given the numbers, it is likely that the Centre would have had a narrow majority to pass the Bills in the Upper House and that the purpose of seeking a division may have been to call out the ambiguous position of some allies (the SAD and the AIADMK, for instance) and put others such as the BJD in a spot.

Even so, it has provided a window for the Opposition to allege that the ruling party has undermined the role of Parliament and rammed home legislation that is unpopular in a large swathe of the country. What this has also done is to muddle substance and procedure, which is unfortunate, because the obvious merits of the Bills have been lost in the messy and ham-handed manner in which they have become the law of the land.