History of the Parliament of India Vol.VI

This is the sixth and concluding volume of History of Parliament of the India. It covers the period of ninth and tenth Lok Sabhas (1989-1996). One chapter is devoted to the rise and decline of the Indian Parliament and a recap and summing up of its changing face and functions during the past half-century. The most valuable and contemporaneously relevant is the concluding chapter appropriately titled \'The Road Ahead\'. It examines the reasons for the erosion of the authority and pristine glory of the institution of Parliament and stresses the importance of Parliament reviewing and refurbishing its structural-functional requirements from time to time. To guard against further putrefaction and decay of the institution, the author suggests many parliamentary reforms - both substantive and procedural, and presents a blue print for renewing parliamentary institutions and procedures.

This volume is a part of the six volumes history of Parliament which would remain an important contribution to parliamentary political science, prove seminal and generate wider interest in the area. The first volume with a Foreword by the then President of India was released in 1994. Subsequent volumes appeared during 1995-1998 with a regularity of one each year.

This volume covers the period of the ninth and the tenth Lok Sabha (1989-1996). The ninth Lok Sabha (1989-1991) shall be remembered for having been the "hung house", for throwing up a succession of constitutional crises, for two non-Congress Prime Ministers heading minority governments with outside support and for having had the shortest life span of fifteen months only. It was in this Lok Sabha that the BJP emerged as a major force and brought down a government through the first ever defeat on the floor of the House. The tenth Lok Sabha (1991-1996) that followed the gruesome assassination of Rajiv Gandhi and the most brutal and violent electoral exercise lasted its full term because of the Congress Government that it threw up succeeding in converting its minority into a majority through managing splits in opposition parties and securing defections by bribing and buying members with money and ministership.