 Whatever you did, if it wasn't good enough, you needed to try and do better and keep at it. Actually, village life produces the philosophical ideas that are germane to democratic thought and practice. I mean, just losing four of your bandmates, soulmates is bad enough. But the worst thing is out of those four families, two of the families blame to me. But the progress from 1991 to 2017, I think only took India to a better place. It was really through the transition into politics that I had the good luck of becoming a writer. We heard so much about the festival in India, the scale of it, the energy of it and I just love the fact that there is this effort to bring it to other cities in the world. It's a variety of topics. It's meaningful. I'm just excited. I'm feeling like I've learned a lot, a lot to think about and I appreciate Jail of coming here. Going forward, it would be a very good thing to do for the community to have this event on an annual basis. I think that when you hear so many different voices and perspectives about the South Asian diaspora and many other issues, you learn that there's a lot of history that you're not taught every day and I think that that's important to bring in today's world. I was actually really surprised by the camaraderie I experienced here and the way that people at JLF, both attendees and other panelists, seemed to really connect profoundly to literature and care about it. Nothing's going to stop us from bringing our writers and speakers to you in Boulder, Colorado, Houston, New York and Toronto, Canada. I did to welcome you to the ninth edition of the JLF at London at the British Library, supported by Haldi Rams. It's a pleasure to present to you today East Minister, Westminster Constitutions and their fault lines. Despite shared constitutional heritage and political forms, India's East Minister democracy has diverged widely from Westminster over the last 75 years. However, recent events such as Brexit, the COVID-19 pandemic and questions of free speech, dissent and civil liberties in both India and the UK have revealed a different picture. Baroness Helena Kennedy is a member of the House of Lords Justice and Home Affairs Committee, an expert in human rights law, civil liberties and constitutional issues, and the author of Misjustice, How British Law is Failing Women. Tripur Dhamman Singh is an academic and the author of Nehru, the debates that defined India and 16 stormy days, the story of the First Amendment of the Constitution of India. In conversation with Chintan Chandrachut Barrister and the acclaimed author of the cases that India forgot and balanced constitutionalism, courts and legislatures in India and the United Kingdom. Baroness Kennedy and Singh discussed the similar faults and challenges both East Minister and Westminster are struggling to address. This conversation will be followed by a Q&A session. Do follow our social media handles, get notifications on the upcoming sessions. Please tweet and tag using at JLF Litfest and use the hashtags hashtag JLF London 2022 and JLF London at British Library. Ladies and gentlemen, East Minister, Westminster, constitutions and their fault lines. Tripur Dhamman Singh and Helena Kennedy in conversation with Chintan Chandrachut. Thank you for that introduction. You've saved me the trouble of introducing my esteemed co-panelists. So let me jump straight in to you, Tripur Dhamman. The title for today's discussion was inspired by a piece in the times of India that you wrote a few months ago. And you said in that piece and I quote, that the creation of the constitution was far more than just the transplanting of the Westminster system on Indian soil. And that India's founding fathers wanted to shape their own version of Westminster. And hence, of course, East Minister. I'm sure we can come up with many other variations. For example, Westminster with Indian masala or the reverse of chicken tikka masala or the like. But we'll save that for later. But can you elaborate on that and identify some of the key differences between Westminster and East Minister? Because conventional wisdom is that there is a certain colonial continuity and that institutions that existed in India prior to independence carried on as they were based on their inherited traditions. Right. So before I start, just a quick shout out to my friend Harshand Kumar Singham who actually coined the term East Minister, which I rather shamelessly used. But it's true that while the Indian constitution was grounded in the Westminster tradition, there were very specific problems that they were also trying to address. And one of them was, of course, the lack of any previous experience of democratic rule. And one was the lack of these sort of background conditions that we normally take for granted. That is a certain level of socioeconomic development, education and so on and so forth. And so the Indian constitution in trying to address those diverges in ways that initially can seem quite innocuous, but are actually very, very substantial, which make it a typology of its own. And I think the examples that I gave in that piece are, say, something like the power of ordinance that is provided to the Indian president, which grants the legislature, sorry, which grants the executive the power to legislate in place of the legislature without a declaration of emergency or anything. Or laws that place, for example, the executive in the kind of driving seat of legislative business, that is the power to prorogue parliament, for example, where, I mean the Indian constitution, for example, only the only limit it sets is that there can't be more than six months between two parliamentary sessions. But it literally leaves it up to the executive to, for example, decide when those sessions are. So those are just two examples, but I mean we can run through more if you'd like. But in and of itself, what they do is that they place a lot of emphasis on executive supremacy and they kind of diminish the legislature quite a bit. And that's I think the most sort of, that's the primary or what I would say the most obvious way in which it diverges. And was that a conscious choice made at the time of the founding? IE, did the founders consider the Westminster system as it is and reject it on the basis that it is unsuitable for Indian conditions? Or did it happen more clearly or in an unconscious way? I mean it is possible to say that they weren't quite entirely cognizant of what the repercussions of what they were doing could be. But they were very conscious of the fact that it was not just a simple, you know, we pick up what we see in Westminster and we transplant it to India. And even though there are, there were people who were really, you know, not very happy with what was being done. There's, for example, the former Chief Minister of Karnataka, K. Hanuman Thayyam had made quite a, he gave a quote, and I, if I remember it correctly, something along the lines of we were expecting the Vina and the Tabla, but actually this is the music of an English band. And in response to that, I would say that it's actually not the, you know, not the music of an English band. And these things are what indigenous Westminster make it, were thought to make it somehow suitable to Indian conditions grounded in the Indian experience. Helena, do you prefer an English band to the Vina and the Tabla? Well, I was, it's so interesting listening because I think your first sentences probably explained why in creating the Indian constitution your founding fathers decided to give so much power to the executive. Because of, as you said, the, the differentials in relation to, for example, education, that a large population were still aspiring to education but hadn't, were still illiterate. And there was not the, if you like, democratic literacy. They felt that it was necessary in order to have the, you know, distributed power. But let me just say to you that the whole purpose for us in a parliamentary democracy of having the parliament as the ultimately the seat of power was to make sure that you had some way of constraining the power of the executive, of the cabinet, of those who were in governing. And we're experiencing at this very moment in time and I know that we'll move on to it. But we're experiencing a sort of desire to be more like India. We're actually seeing an erosion of our parliamentary democracy because of the grab for power by our own executive. And so they obviously would much prefer to have an Indian system. But we're not going to let them do that. No, of course. And I think it was quite graphically illustrated when Boris Johnson did try to prorogue parliament and it didn't, things didn't pan out the way he was, he expected. But in, for example, if the context was India, it was perfectly possible for them to prorogue parliament for a period of six months. He must have, he must have been looking over the shoulder of Indian politicians and thinking, well, they can do it. Why can't I do it? You know? If we, if we want a more topical example, we have one from last week, which is the no confidence vote against Boris Johnson. And it's arguably an example the other way because Pripodaman, as I, as I understand it, you don't necessarily contend that the shift to East Ministers always a good thing. You say that there are structural weaknesses on account of some of the divergences between East Minster and West Minster. And one striking example of that is, of course, the lack of internal party, intra-party democracy in India. And I suppose the equivalent of what we saw in the UK over the last two weeks in India is a large number of MPs voting against their own Prime Minister and Parliament, which I think to any, any Indian is unimaginable. I think that issue, I'd like to know more about it from both of you, that you're saying that internal party democracy is not very well developed in India. That idea that somehow the majority of parliamentarians could actually unseat someone who they felt was leading them in a way that had become unpalatable. And while it didn't work this time, we have a very wounded Prime Minister now here in the United Kingdom. And that can affect, of course, the way in which government business is done because those who are wounded tend to try very hard to recuperate. And in doing so may reach for policies which are perhaps ill thought out. Though it's hard to imagine policies being more ill thought out than they have been up until now by this government. Do you have any thoughts on that? You're right that internal democracy, if one might call it that, in parties in India is not very well developed. But that's, of course, one part of the equation. The other part of the equation is that the constitution itself, unlike here, intervenes in intraparty politics in India and solidifies power for party bosses. Because I think you must be familiar with, of course, with it, with the 10th Schedule and the 52nd Amendment and all of these things which enjoin on an MP to resign or grant the speaker quasi-judicial power to suspend or expel an MP if they would against the party, what they're told by the party whip. So, in a sense, the concept of backbench rebellions in and of itself doesn't really exist in India and hasn't really existed at least since the 80s, since this came the thing. And that's, if I might say so, as something even more retrograde than not questions of what party MPs do within, in and of themselves, of how they choose a party leader or not. That's interesting. I'm sorry if I'm interrupting, but I think that there are people in this audience who are not familiar with the Indian system. And, for example, that comes as a novel idea to me that you can't, as a backbencher, ever vote against your own party without there being the consequence that you might end up being dismissed. You can be sacked. Is that right? As a member of parliament, if you vote against golly? Well, that's a bit alarming. You have to make something, you have to get that changed. I certainly wouldn't be here. Well, not give Boris Johnson any ideas. I wouldn't be here if I hadn't had the opportunity of voting against my own party, which, you know, I've always said that my master is law. I'm a lawyer. I'm, you know, steeped in the law, and I believe in respecting law and human rights. And there were, whichever government, whether it was a government of the party to which I generally give my support or the opposition, I will oppose things that I think are running in the face of the rule of law. And so it wouldn't be possible. For example, if Chintan were a politician and he is also a lawyer and a Greek constitutional lawyer, if he found something was unacceptable, he wouldn't be able to vote against it? Well, he'd be able to vote against it. He'd pay a price. He'd pay a price. It would be fatal. And dare I say, the seat would be the smallest price at best. Probably, yeah, in other ways too. Can I ask about this business of proroguing? It sounds as though that the executive, you know, those who are the ministers and the prime minister, I'm pointing this out because one of my sisters once said to me, who are the executive puzzled her? And not everybody knows that inside language, which people who understand the nature of governance don't understand the inner language. But the executive being ministers, the cabinet and the prime minister. And so you're saying that they have ultimate power in India and it can't be challenged by parliament. Whereas what we are seeing in Britain just now, and there's a big complaint about it, is that we're seeing a sort of shift of power away from parliament, which has always been able to hold the executive to account. And we see that as being fundamental, that you can elect a government, they're in there for a number of years and you don't want to be having elections every other week. So you want them to be in there for a period of time. But they have to be held to account because power is delightful and absolute power is absolutely delightful. And so you have to be able to constrain that power. So how are abuses of power by the executive constrained in India? I mean I'd argue that they're not constrained in any fundamental way. So the constitution in itself, and unlike everywhere else, there's no real reason for the executive in India to try any more extra constitutional maneuvers. Because the constitution in itself now concentrates power so heavily in their hands. And as I mentioned right at the start, for example, India is the only country where the constitution grants the executive powers to legislate in place of the legislature without there being a declaration of emergency or something like that. And it is possibly the only democracy in the world to have such a setup. Even in America where you have quite a powerful presidency, does the president have the power to legislate in place of Congress? And this is a kind of legal invention that I'm yet to see anywhere else. So I do think that the fundamental question of how parliament constrains executive power in India is something that actually needs some sort of resolution for Indian democracy to really thrive or to survive in the way that we imagine it should. I'd agree with that. Helena, my own view is to put it in a sentence. In India, the executive controls parliament rather than parliament controlling the executive. And it's arguably gotten worse and worse over the years. It's an area of increasing divergence between Westminster and Eastminster. But if I can take a step back, you've been a member of the House of Lords since 1997. Yes. So over 20 years, the nature of parliament and the nature of executive accountability has changed considerably since your time in the House. Are there areas in which you think Westminster can learn from Eastminster? I certainly wouldn't like to see the government having more power. I really do feel that democracy depends on constraints upon power. And those constraints are exercised in a number of different ways. And in a parliamentary democracy, it's usually that you have to struggle to get your legislation through and your parliamentarians in taking their oath are making a commitment to basically hold government to account. Now, obviously, those who have ministerial jobs want to keep their ministerial jobs, so they're not going to vote against anything that the Prime Minister decides he wants to do. And those who have ambitions to become ministers are usually fairly compliant. So it's usually, by and large, people can get their legislation through as long as they can make good arguments for it. Now, recently, we've seen a departure from good practice. We've seen the Johnson government has been using what we would call Henry VIII powers. And Henry VIII powers, why would anybody know what Henry VIII powers are? But the sort of thing that constitutional lawyers and the judges in the House of Lords are particularly preoccupied by, because it means that you are, through secondary legislation, giving a lot of power to the government to use secondary legislation, which is not scrutinized in the same way as primary legislation. And so we've seen a huge increase in the use of secondary legislation. We've also seen what happens when you have a huge majority. And many years ago, in fact, during the government of Mrs. Thatcher, Lord Hilscham, formerly known as Quentin Hogg, once made a very interesting speech of important constitutional significance, where he said that it is not good for parliamentary democracy when you have too large a majority, you end up with an elected dictatorship. And that business of having an elected dictatorship is something that should concern all of us. That huge majority that was gleaned because of persuading people that, you know, were going to deliver Brexit and people had been persuaded that Brexit was a good idea. I was never one of those people. But in making that promise, then many people who would not normally have voted Conservative did, in fact, vote for the Conservative government. So it's got a huge majority, and it means that even though we in the House of Lords frequently seek to amend legislation, seek to improve upon it, are worried about the seizing of more too much power to the Secretary of State in different departments, when it goes back down to the Commons, it's overturned because there's such a huge majority. And I just wanted to finally say that one of the real problems that we've got just now is that we get what's called skeleton bills. And that means that we get bills that are put together in the most perfunctory way. They're not well drafted, and they basically have a sort of idea of something that people want to do. The detail is not present. And what is inside the bill are clauses which then empower the Secretary of State to put flesh on the bones of the piece of legislation. That gives huge power to Secretaries of State. And we've seen it in the Home Office, where the Secretary of State has acquired a whole lot of powers through that means. And we've seen it in other departments of state. And so that's a very worrying development. And in fact, just a couple of weeks ago, our former Chief Justice, Igor Judge, a great legal champion. I think that I remembered, Chintan, you having him speak at one of the debates about Magna Carta. Yeah. And you chaired that. And he was a great, he really understands the unwritten British constitution. And he is outraged by what he sees as being a sort of capturing of more power to the executive. And yet the government is talking about rebalancing power as between the legislature and the judiciary, wanting to inhibit the judiciary's powers. And of course, the reason for that is because the judiciary stopped his efforts to prorogue parliament. And it was our Supreme Court that put a halt to that. Mr. Pudaman, can I ask you the same question in reverse? Are there particular areas where Eastminster can learn from Westminster? Or are there low-hanging fruit? I mean, we've discussed some of the key areas, but those seem difficult. Those seem like they're hard to achieve. Are there easier targets? I don't think any of the targets are actually that easy given just how much Westminster relies on unwritten conventions and precedent and, you know, these sort of normative, I mean, norms that really are taken for granted in a way. And that was one of the reasons that Eastminster, in a way, evolved in the way that it did, was that with the lack of any sort of democratic traditions was the need for what one might call, you know, instant conventions. And so one of the, so for Indian politicians operating in that era, the problem was that every administrative difficulty they came up with at one level required a solution, but at another level whatever they did was also something that was going to create a precedent by virtue of being the first time that it was being done. And I think what Eastminster might take from Westminster is a kind of healthy appreciation for just how much value there is on these sort of unwritten conventions and precedents. I'm going to disillusion you because those unwritten conventions are absolutely withering on the vine. Because what those unwritten conventions rely upon is honourable behaviour. It relies upon people behaving well and being honest as politicians. And I'm afraid that we've seen a great reduction in that. One of the things that those conventions relied upon was being an honourable person. And the person who writes a lot about this is Lord Hennessy, Peter Hennessy, one of Britain's great historians. And he talks about the good chaps way of doing politics, right? Well, we're running out of good chaps. And so the problem is that we've seen that people can't now don't feel ashamed. You can't shame Boris Johnson. And so being cavalier with the truth, being untrustworthy on many different fronts, it almost doesn't have an impact if you're charming enough and if you somehow are a cheeky chappy. So you're not an honest chappy, but a cheeky chappy seems to get a lot of indulgence here in the United Kingdom. And I do think that we can't escape from the fact that there are two other things that you have to talk about here. One is the fact of social media, the way in which technology has changed our politics around the world. Political systems are being hugely impacted by social media and the whole Twitter sphere and all of that. And that has damaged, I think, the quality of debate, public discourse, the public square has been affected by the disinhibition that that has given, that people feel uninhibited about what they say and the vulgarity of debate and so on is now a serious problem. The other problem about it is that we've had two pandemics. There's the pandemic that we've all daily had to deal with, with COVID-19, but we've also had a pandemic globally of the rise of populist governments. And it's important for us to understand what that is about and that I think is a response to globalism and a particular economic model that has not been successful in creating the better society. You referred to both pandemics. I do want to come back to the COVID-19 pandemic, but let's discuss the second pandemic first if you're okay with that. I'd like some water. Can you pass me a paper cup? So let's consider the Brexit referendum for instance. The obviously tempting thought is that if Britain had something of a written constitution or even if not a full constitution, a canonical document, that would have been legislated for in a more serious way. Was the way in which the referendum was conducted, i.e. you make a decision that affects generations, by a single vote, by simple majority at a single point of time, appropriate? And if it wasn't appropriate, would having had a written document in advance made any difference or not really? Now, I'm going to make a confession to everybody that I was the chair of Charter 88 throughout the 90s. Charter 88 was a constitutional reform organization. And what we sought to do is what brought me into the House of Lords really. What we sought to do and it was cross-party, and the idea was that we needed to have a much more modern architecture for the running of Britain. And one of the things we were advocating for was a written constitution. We also wanted to have a Bill of Rights, we wanted to have devolution decision-making in the sort of nations of the United Kingdom, closer to home. We wanted to see a Freedom of Information Act, and we wanted to see reform of the House of Lords so that it wasn't just based on the hereditary principle. So a lot of that, we had to spend a lot of time persuading the Labour Government was looking as though it might win the next election in the 90s, and so we persuaded Labour to embrace it. It was hard work, let me tell you, because there's a resistance to lots of those things in quarters of the Labour Party too. But it became a big part of the new Labour's policy to have a new sort of, you know, basically a new way of people relating to government. But the one thing that didn't come through was a written constitution. I mean, there was a little bit of softening up of many of those things. They didn't quite happen in the way that we had wanted. But the written constitution wasn't embarked upon at all. And the reason why was no government will give up the legislative time that's necessary to create the, you know, it would take you, it would take, I can't begin to tell you how much time, because every sentence would be challenged and be a source of contest. And so no government ever wants to do it. So what I want to see now is that I want to see us doing a piecemeal. And the first thing is, is I want to see a return to honest politics. I want people to be forced to resign when they lie to Parliament. I want to see that when people behave dishonorably, that they are expected to resign. When there is an inquiry by a senior distinguished civil servant finding out that a senior politician has been bullying staff and civil servants and so on, that person should be required to resign. And so, I mean, the standards and politics have to be reasserted and I want to see that as being the first step in piecemeal creating what ultimately might be a more effective constitutional arrangement. How about that? Tripur Dhamman, we have a bit of a paradox in India, isn't it? Because we do have a written constitution, a lengthy written constitution. But it's not one of those constitution that's hard to amend. It's, in fact, relatively easy to amend, particularly if you compare it, for example, to the US constitution. Simple majority on most occasions typically don't require state ratifications except for a few issues. And as you know, the constitution is amended very frequently, often more than once a year. How is that done? Is it set down that if you get two-thirds of a majority, you can change the constitution? That's right, so it's by a two-thirds majority present in voting in both houses of parliament. But there's no referendum, there's no need for state ratification for most amendments, barring a few. And as I've said, I think there have been probably about 120 or so amendments in the last 75 years, so it's... Our problem on the referendum issue was that it had never been set down anywhere at the idea that there should be a two-thirds majority, which would have been very sensible. And the problem with the referendum on Brexit was that it followed fairly quickly on the referendum in Scotland on independence. And so it should have been done before the Scottish referendum because once they hadn't done it on the Scottish referendum, it became very difficult to argue that somehow the game had to change with one that followed only a short time later. But it's a bit of an unfair game, isn't it? Because you can keep asking for referendums, but once you exit, you can't re-enter. It's very hard to re-enter. Well, I mean, the long-term impact... It's a lopsided game. Well, I mean, it's rather like the Scottish situation. It was that once you're independent, it's got long-term consequences. And I think that any of those big constitutional issues where you have a referendum should require something like two-thirds of a majority. I mean, the House of Lords doesn't know how it is not elected, so therefore we don't feel that we have the right to stop something. But certainly I think that in the Commons and in the referendum, there should be some ways in which these things can be done in a much more sensible way. And the fact that on such a small majority we've ended up leaving the European Union with the incredible consequences that that will carry for us in years to come and in the balance of powers globally, I think, was a serious issue and we didn't give enough thought to it in advance. Tripodaman, have we in India struck the right balance then? Is it enough to say, well, if you have a two-thirds majority in both houses, i.e. if you control parliament, then you can amend the constitution however you like subject to the constraints of the courts, of course, without referendum, without on most occasions state ratification and so on? I mean, the idea was that with that you wouldn't, because as you said, we have the most lengthy constitution in the world and one of the ideas behind such lengthy codification was that codification in a way would somehow compensate for the lack of democratic tradition or historical experience. And that's already, I would say, quite a debatable point of view to say that somehow by lengthy codification you will actually teach people how to really work a democratic system. So I would take exception to that view right from the beginning. And second is that the problem with amendments is that we've traditionally looked towards the judiciary to kind of really define what can or can't be amended and the judiciary has never had a particularly consistent position. And so jurisprudence on this has also evolved. They've sort of flip-flopped from saying everything is amendable to saying, well, fundamental rights are completely unamendable to then saying, well, fundamental rights are amendable, but we have something called a basic structure which nobody sort of initially knew, but which over time I guess has become clearer and clearer. And so the problem is that we have quite easy sort of process of amendment and that process as we saw both with the First Amendment and recently with the amendments to Article 370 is in itself open to quite being relatively creatively interpreted. And so I think India would do a lot better with somehow amendments being either a requirement for two-thirds majority in the provinces or at least to being, I'd say, especially the provinces which are especially concerned with parts of the constitution that's being amended because right now you also have, the Union has really given the power, for example, to make or break provinces at will. And I don't think that's a particularly healthy precedent or a particularly healthy thing for Indian democracy. Would you legislate in a referendum? Would you have lied, for example, for there to have been a referendum prior to the amendments to Article 370? I would, again, having, you know, if you'd asked me this question before the Brexit referendum, I probably would have had a different answer. But having seen how referendums can also unfold and that's not to say that it's because the result is unexpected but I think one has to be quite careful before throwing what could be quite complex questions just open to the public. I would really advocate that India steers well away from referendums. I have now got a very jaundice view of referendums and I think that the change in the way in which information is spread amongst our populations because of social media makes it very hard to have confidence that a referendum is going to work. You ask us a very simple question. I mean, this is the difficult thing about it, is you're asking us very simple questions, stay in or come out of Europe. And what we do know, and the evidence really is clear, the Cambridge Analytica exposure of how you can, through algorithmic interference and so on, actually target parts of the population and really try to get them not to vote or try to get them to vote in ways that might be contrary to their own interests, is a really damaging thing. And we've seen it in the United States just how this has played out in dividing that nation so successfully. And I'm afraid that I feel alarmed about that interference in elections everywhere now. Before we move to the audience, I do want to come to briefly the second pandemic which you were referring to, the more conventional pandemic which is COVID-19. And there has arguably been executive overreach and underreach in both jurisdictions. In India you might say that, well, there was of course a lockdown imposed with no notice and we knew what follows, the exodus of migrant labourers from cities to villages and so on. And arguably also underreach because there was a failure to ramp up public health infrastructure when it could have been ramped up, when there was an opportunity. And it's very much the same in the UK, isn't it? We started with the policy of herd immunity, let everyone go out with gay abandon. And we then moved to a policy of strict national lockdowns with little or no parliamentary oversight. What lessons do we learn from those experiences? Well, I now run the International Bar Association's Institute of Human Rights so we were monitoring, we had a specific project of monitoring the impact of COVID and what it did in relation to law, the world over. And there was no doubt that in many of the governments that I would consider to be populist governments where they rely on simple messages and where there is usually a very powerful figurehead who sort of dictates the terms of debate. I think there have been serious assaults. It's much better to actually read these two pandemics together because what the COVID pandemic produced for us were abuses of the rule of law which they claimed were necessary because of COVID. And so you saw that in so many places and it took different forms and sometimes it would be sort of, you know, cutting off the internet to certain communities so that they weren't even getting information which was necessary about COVID but also forcing people to stay indoors in circumstances where that provided opportunities for domestic violence, for abuse of children in all manner of things. And so there were serious ways in which COVID provided a sort of cover for authoritarian governments to be abusive of the rule of law. Now, I'm a rule of law person. I believe that the rule of law is fundamental to making a democracy work and what has happened with the rise of populist governments is they're usually run by people who don't like opponents. They don't like criticism. So what do they do? They go after their critics. If you're Putin, you poison your opposition. If you are somebody in other places, you basically go after them in other ways. And one of the ways that you can do that is by controlling your media. So often you find in authoritarian, you know, authoritarian democracies. The idea of liberal democracy isn't about, it's not about being liberal in terms of even of progressive ideas. It's about being government for everybody. And that means everybody, including minorities. And what you see in places like Hungary is a democratically elected leader who would say that he's there, he's running a democracy, but is very pointed in saying it's not a liberal democracy because he doesn't like homosexuality. He doesn't like the idea of women having too many rights and so on. And one of the things that he is very clear about is that he wants to have a judiciary that is captured and is tame to his ends that will deal with his opponents. He wants to be able to clamp down on immigration in a very authoritarian manner. And he also wants to make sure that the press is owned by his friends in order to make sure that... I mean, I'm giving that example of Hungary because I think it's quite an interesting one of where we've seen the whole business of using a period of the pandemic where he went after the media and legislated against journalists writing stuff that he didn't like during that period, and it had no sunset clause on it. So I think that the coming together of the two pandemics was particularly poisonous for liberal democracy and liberal democracy should be our aspiration. Before we move to the audience, the same question to you. I mean, it's hard to add to anything that Helena has said because one, of course, she put it so eloquently, but second, that I agree with every word that she said. And I do think that COVID created a situation where it became possible to, I guess, play fast and loose with what we take to be the rule of law and what we take to be liberal democracy. I do think that somewhere like Britain, there was a tremendous pushback against it as well. You saw it both within and outside parliament. And I often didn't agree, for example, with the crowds that used to gather every Saturday on Trafalgar Square, but I, you know, anti-vaxxers and quite eclectic sort of mix, should I put it with people, did somewhere get the sentiment that, you know, that they were not agreeable to living in a proto-authoritarian society and I think there was something admirable in a sense about it. And that is something that we did not see in India where despite, in a sense, having this quite brutal national lockdown, there was no electoral price that, for example, the BJP has paid. If anything, they've won handsomely in most of the elections after that. So does that tell you something about society? Well, maybe, maybe not. But I do think that it normalized, in a sense, this way of being. And I think there is a kind of danger for this sort of... the use of biological emergencies in the future. On that note, I think we should now move to the audience. If you do have any questions, please raise your hands. Mr. Tharoor. Do we have a mic somewhere? We do. It's just coming over. Thanks. That was a fabulously interesting discussion. Thanks to all three of you. Couple of questions, I mean, couple of comments with questions embedded in them. On the issue of executive overreach, the one area none of you touched upon was the federalism that is supposed to be core to our constitution. So, for example, when you mentioned executive overreach on the declaration of a lockdown, it was not just that parliament wasn't consulted and indeed the cabinet wasn't consulted, but that the states were not consulted and they're the ones who had to implement the lockdown because law and order is a state subject. With the result that, in fact, it was a, strictly speaking, a violation of the constitution that no one pointed out at the time. I'd like to know your thoughts on that, I suppose, more than Helena, but Helena doesn't have that particular issue here. It's one that in the Indian context is worrying because you do have a situation where when you talk about breaks or checks on executive overreach, the existence of state governments that are not necessarily run by the same party as runs the central government is the one check we've got in our democracy against a fiat kind of system. The second comment and question is, of course, that none of you also talked about parliamentary procedure. I think the anti-reflection law is right. I think the two MPs sitting here from India both share your concern very much. Your excoriation of that law which was passed, Helena, with very good intentions. There was an epidemic of people hopping from one party to the next in order to create a legislative majority and usually motivated by PELF, by money, by Luka. And therefore the law was passed in order to prevent that from happening, but now it's become an instrument of party autocracies where essentially every bill, without exception, involves a whip and there is no freedom of conscience any more for MPs. But what about other procedures? For example, the fact that no private member's bill ever gets seriously discussed or passed. The fact that the opposition is unable to have any time during a parliamentary week to place its issues on the agenda. The government not only decides on the bills they introduce, they also decide on what legislative business will be discussed. With the result that, as you know, we have a record number of disruptions from frustrated opposition parties saying, well, if we can't discuss this issue, we'll paralyze the House until we can shout slogans raising these issues. Now, I remember speaking to Speaker John Burkow when he led a parliamentary delegation to India a few years ago, and he said that the last parliamentary disruption in England was 1661 or whenever it was, Cromwell came by and marched into the House and disrupted it. We have one every day, almost, certainly every week. So these are issues again. Can parliamentary procedures be improved by learning from the Westminster model? Would you like to start? Yes, sure. I mean, I agree entirely with what Dr Thiru says, and I think he has pointed out to parliamentary procedure, which is a key part of... It's a key part of, like, the concept of East Minster as Harshandan kind of developed it, but also a key part of the article that I wrote. And in that, he's entirely right that the executive is placed in charge of legislative business, which obviously gives it an inordinate amount of power. And on federalism, of course, I mean, the Indian Constitution isn't really all that federal, either, given that it again gives... It's highly centralized and at the end of the day, it gives the Union the power to both make a state and to dismember a state if it so wants and without any reference to the people who are living there. And so I would disagree with the idea that state governments are in effect a particularly important check on executive power, but I do agree that this personal of political authority is in and of itself a very productive check on all powerful executives, and I think perhaps whenever he's back in power a solidification of Indian federalism in the Constitution would be in order. And along with that, also solidification of dispersal of power within parliament and within parties because, given how the Indian political system is structured, the... And if we look back at history, the only times when Indian democracy is seen to have I guess the notion in a way that would be recognizable as democratic or democratic in the kind of normative way that we see in the West would be when no single party is able to muster a large majority and I think so perhaps whenever he's next in power solidification of some of these ideas into the constitutional structure would be a great thing to see. The only thing I would say is that I was pointing out that governments never want to engage with seriously creating a new constitution and so for us to get any change or any written constitution in Britain would be impossible. Constitutions tend to be created at points of great change. Your country in the great sort of moment of 47 to 40, that moment of change and usually it's after a revolution or after a war Germany got its new constitution after the Second World War Japan too and so it tends to be that constitutions come out of great disruptions of some kind and so you don't get any government also very willing to give power away once they're elected. So you know there was the Blair government in the manifesto they've made their commitments to the sort of charter 88 agenda but as soon as they were in power the idea of having proportional representation was jettisoned the idea of having a written constitution was jettisoned. They did incorporate the European Convention on Human Rights into English law and Scots law and the Northern Irish law in different legislation but then they were sort of almost ran away from it. They looked at it well enough and didn't let the public feel that this belonged to them and so it's been a hard old thing protecting the Human Rights Act and now we've got a government that's come in that wants to bring in a British Bill of Rights and the British Bill of Rights they want to bring in is about less rights, not more rights so you know always be wary when people are making a gift of rights they don't usually they have to usually have their arm twisted and that was one of the reasons why I ended up in the House of Lords was that I was to help put through some of those constitutional changes like the Human Rights Act and now it's under threat which I think is a great regrettable thing to be happening and we have to all campaign and get on the streets because it has protected minority communities, it's protected the rights of women and it has been absolutely powerful in protecting the rights of all of us as citizens so we've got to be on the streets for that one Should we go back to the audience for some more questions? Thank you for a very informative session so I think one thing we can all agree on that between East Minster and West Minster one thing is definitely for common that is yes minister right? So I would like to know like what according to you is the major interest in civil services or bureaucracy in the way both the government's function and especially to what extent is bureaucracy an enabler and an impediment to decision making? Thank you So bureaucracy is not something that I'm the most familiar with or something that I really write about or work on but again I would say purely from observation that bureaucracy in Britain seem to have I guess a lot more freedom of conscience and a lot less how should I put it sense of craveness towards political authority than India and of course it also helps that Britain has a sort of far longer tradition of sort of bureaucratic work I mean of file notings and the need for ministerial directions and when ministerial directions are needed and not needed and I think also much stronger freedom of information act and things like that which I guess from my point of view make it a society that is a lot more open government that is a lot more open than one which we experience in India I mean one of the great things of the great institution in the British political system was the independent civil service and while we all laughed at yes minister about the power that was wielded by permanent secretaries in the senior civil service and no doubt that was true but the purpose of the senior civil servants role as someone experienced who's come up through the system is to basically deliver the policies of the government of the day but also to advise the government of the day when some of the policies that they want to deliver are unworkable they're not deliverable so you have to be prepared to speak truth to power so the idea of the senior civil servant is that someone with the experience would be able to say to the prime minister if it was the cabinet secretary or if you're the senior person, the permanent secretary for an office say I'm not sure that that would be a wise thing to do and of course there are all these other people who are the legal advisors and so on who are trying to give legal advice about what is not a good thing to do and unfortunately there has been a growing thing in Britain and it's not confined to one party this has been happening over decades now has been the rise of the special political advisor the SPAD and the special political advisor is basically to replace that role of the yes minister civil servant and so the SPAD is there and so you will say you know this is what we want to do and we're going to do it come hell or high water and the permanent secretary will say well actually hold on a minute and would often be listened to the permanent secretaries are now being put to the edge and their power is being reduced to a minimum and I think that is a great pity of not taking advice and it results in I think bad government if you don't listen to the people who have gathered experience over many decades and are now a senior level if you don't listen to their advice then you're likely to get into trouble and unfortunately arrogant government means that there's less respect for the advice that's coming from our senior civil servants who let me tell you work very hard that business about being impartial but you know we did lots of things I mean I was against the Iraq war the advice that was being given from the senior lawyer one of the senior lawyers there Elizabeth Wilmshurst resigned because the lawyers inside the Foreign Office were saying this is going to be contrary to international law and they got a UN resolution and then they went to the international lawyers externally and they had to go cherry picking to find the one that would give the advice that would enable the war to take place and once you start doing that you really are entering the business of poor governance and so I regret the diminution of our civil service but I think it is being damaged and I think that it was one of the sort of things that enriched our democracy having that independence look at the business in the United States they appoint that all their ambassadors and everybody are renewed every time there's a new president and so then I mean in fact Trump didn't appoint most of his ambassadors around the world I don't know if India was lucky enough to get one but you know lots of places because it wasn't considered important to him to have ambassadors because he'd given up on the international he didn't believe in internationalism it was put America first that was his priority so appointing ambassadors wasn't important we have professional ambassadors you have professional ambassadors by and large and I think that is a good thing and people need to be advised about why doing certain things might be dangerous in terms of world peace so I'm in favour of an independent civil service and I think ours is currently being eroded just a quick point I mean I agree with everything Helena the only point that I did make is not just the sort of tradition of independence in India's civil service is completely eroded but India also has a particularly opaque government structure so I think that is definitely a menable to easy access which makes it I guess doubly dangerous in fact we may have time for one last question right here in the centre is there a mic just be with you shortly hi I think my name is moral comment but curious to hear who is on the stage right now and in general is sort of this collective amnesia about the imperial legacy of the UK and how that's impacted legislation around the world I grew up in Malaysia and 62 years of independence and we still retain legislation which India does as well I believe that has already been repealed here for example the sedition act printing and publishers act sodomy laws and so on and I'm just wondering how often in these conversations about when you're amending legislation constitutions clearly the UK has repealed certain laws because it no longer works does that feature in the Indian discourse and also in the UK is that ever also brought up this is a consequence of what we did it continues to impact human rights around the world and it continues to impact democracies around the world because of something we introduced years ago but I'm really curious how that works with these conversations good example of this Tripur Daman is of course the Indian penal code which continues to retain what's described as the marital rape exception i.e. a husband can never be prosecuted for raping his own wife which dates back to 1860 and of course which is a colonial legacy would you like to address that first yeah sure and you're completely right and it's not that they don't feature in conversations but again as Elena said governments find it useful to have these quite nebulous laws on the books because at some point or the other they're always useful to trap critics or to jam opponents with or to wheel discretionary power and in a sense India is peculiarly vulnerable to forms of discretionary power I always like to say that it's a country of petty sovereigns and when the country was being made the communist leader Somnat Lahiri called it a constitution made from the point of view of a police constable and ultimately it's that level of power that's responsible for for working the Indian state and they really are fond of discretionary power as all sort of petty sovereigns are and until you can create enough social consensus to really push back against it or to make sure that the politicians decide that we no longer want these laws in the books I tend to think that they quite like having them there any final comment from you Elena yeah I mean that's a great question I mean there's undoubtedly the legacy of Britain as a colonial power has left around the world in some places have been so detrimental in the some arenas I mean for example just now we do a lot of work on the whole business of raising of trying to end the criminalization of homosexuality because we've done research which has shown that where you have criminal law that makes someone a criminal by virtue of their sexuality it leads to terrible persecution of those of those minorities it means that there's much higher levels of murder of discrimination of assault of abuses of one kind or another and we did a big piece of work particularly around the Caribbean where that was clear and it was shocking and so I feel very strong and I speak about it regularly is that we were responsible for that around the world introducing the idea that it was criminal and that was all a British legacy and we should be there for advocating everywhere we go that this has to be stopped that it was a folly and leads to actually torture and persecution in so many places the business on women of course I mean in 1992 I mean I know it's 30 years ago but I was very involved in the whole business of advocating that we had to end this business that a husband can rape his wife and we know that it sits inside the context of domestic violence of male primacy and male entitlement and we're not going to create a just and fair world for men and women but particularly for women if we don't actually end those kinds of laws and so I think Britain has a responsibility to call it out where they see it and to say we're responsible we've learned our lesson of wisdom now to others okay I'm afraid we've run out of time thank you very much