Carole Spary

Disrupting Rituals of Debate in the Indian Parliament

Disruptions to debate in Indias national parliament by members have generated concern among critics, who have associated disruptions with a larger narrative of the decline of Indias political institutions. The violation of debate through disruption is perceived by parliament as a threat to its prestige, legitimacy, and therefore its institutional reproduction. This article discusses institutional responses, which have, however, avoided formally disciplining members and have instead followed a more accommodative, informal approach to managing disruptions. It employs a framework which posits debate as a parliamentary ritual imbued with symbolic significance for both participants (including MPs) and audiences (including citizens, voters, media) and argues that disruption can be viewed as a crucial aspect of the performance of deliberation and representation in parliamentary debates.

Female Political Leadership in India

Abstract This paper is a recognition and exploration of alternative accounts of female political leadership in India, other than dynastic succession. It explores the varied paths to power which female political leaders in India have followed in the past two decades within the changing institutional environment of electoral politics. The paper argues that gender is an important factor of the path to power as well as the exercise of leadership and the sources of legitimacy that leaders draw upon. The paper critiques essentialised accounts of behavioural styles of gendered leadership, focusing on the moral capital argument. Structural gender bias and gender-biased perceptions and expectations are understood to have a significant impact on assessments of behavioural style and performance. Yet these sources of gender power can be utilised by leaders, reinforcing and legitimising stereotypes in exchange for political power. These insights are applied to the cases of three prominent female political leaders in India.

Legislative protest as disruptive democratic practice

This article explores the phenomenon of legislative protest and presents an analytical framework for understanding its significance for democratic theory and practice. Legislative protest is defined as disruptive behaviour of elected representatives within legislative settings. Acts of legislative protest include sit-ins, boycotts, walkouts, and individual or collective disobedience of the presiding officer within legislative chambers or committees. This article begins from the premise that legislative protest should not be dismissed as frivolous or self-interested behaviour. Such acts are significant because they are disruptive, literally of the routine proceedings of legislatures, and figuratively because they transgress boundaries of “orderliness” according to formal rules and norms of behaviour in legislative settings. Variations in the significance and justifiability of such acts of legislative protest are interpreted according to three key debates in democratic theory, namely legislative conflict, deliberation, and representation. Beyond these three broad debates, it is argued that any attempt to decipher the substantive meaning of legislative protest must be informed by a grounded analysis paying attention to specific forms of protest performed within specific legislative settings. Such analysis should acknowledge the corporeality of protest and its embeddedness within historically contextualized institutional and cultural scripts.

Women candidates and party nomination trends in India – evidence from the 2009 general election

More women MPs than ever before were elected to the lower house of the national parliament of India in the 2009 general election. Yet, the increase in womens presence in the Lok Sabha cannot necessarily be attributed to the increased willingness of political parties to field more women candidates, despite rhetorical party political support for increasing womens participation in political institutions. This article analyses party political nomination of women as candidates in the 2009 election, and finds significant variations in levels of nomination across parties and across Indias states. The article also examines in detail the nomination of female candidates by the two largest political parties, the Indian National Congress party and the Bharatiya Janata Party, both of which support proposals for introducing reserved seats for women in national and state legislatures. The findings reject the proposition that parties only nominate women in unwinnable seats, but finds support for the proposition that parties are risk averse when it comes to nominating women, and that this can restrict the number of women nominated for election. The article concludes with some further questions for future research on gender and political recruitment in India.

Performing Ethno-Linguistic Representation: A Study of Indian Parliamentary Ceremony and Ritual

This article explores the performance of ethno-linguistic representation in the national parliament of India, analyzing language practices in debates and ceremonies. Despite a policy of official multilingualism, strong institutional norms prioritize English or Hindi as the two official languages of parliament. However, regional languages are more popular in some forms of debate and ceremonies than others, particularly in the oath/affirmation as a means of affirming cultural identity. I identify three narratives—functional, instrumental, and affective—that Members of Parliament employ to explain language practices in parliament and to show how parliamentary multilingualism is associated with some ethno-linguistic communities more than others.

The Emergence and Impact of First Female Speakers in the UK, South Africa and India

Women are continuing to make in-roads into male-dominated political institutions around the world (Krook, 2009). The now substantial scholarly literature which examines these dynamics and patterns has come to be known collectively as research on the ‘feminisation of polities’. This term is used to describe and assess the extent to which women have both entered and altered historically male-dominated political institutions (Lovenduski, 2005; Wangnerud, 2009). Much of the literature has focused on political parties (Lovenduski, 2005: 57). This chapter makes a unique contribution to feminisation scholarship by paying attention to the neglected issue of the gendered distribution of parliamentary offices, specifically the Speakership. Through a cross-national comparison of the first female Speakers in the United Kingdom, India and South Africa, we shift the focus away from what happens before and during elections to what happens immediately after. The chapter complements the growing literature on female ministerial and bureaucratic leadership with much-needed research on female legislative leadership. It builds on cross-national research that explores the challenges and opportunities facing women in elected office and analyses how windows of opportunity arise and are exploited by non-traditional political actors (cf. Kittilson, 2006). It adds to our understandings of the dynamics of female political leadership (cf. Norris, 2010; Steinberg, 2008).

Pageantry as Politics: The State Opening of Parliaments in South Africa, India and the UK

National parliaments based on the Westminster system are usually ceremonially opened at the start of each annual session. Such ceremonies present a unique and important perspective upon political institutions, revealing the power dynamics that structure political spaces and shape political practices. A specific set of rituals surrounding this event that emerged in the United Kingdom out of the relationship between the monarch and parliament were exported, through the processes of British imperialism, around the world. Today, in the United Kingdom, India and South Africa, a ceremony with the same basic structure is performed annually by the three national parliaments. The ceremonies involve the head of state journeying from their official residence to the parliamentary buildings, a procession on foot into parliament, and a speech read by the head of state detailing the government’s legislative programme for the coming session. These are relatively mundane actions ‘wrapped in a web of symbolism’ (Kertzer, 1988: 9). This ceremony constitutes, using Edward Muir’s phraseology, both a model and mirror. By calmly travelling in hierarchical, ordered processions, public officials ‘model the behaviour expected of them in the conduct of the affairs of state’. By performing the various ‘rituals of rulership’, public officials come to embody their abstract roles, they ‘mirror’ and thus represent someone or something in a public way (Muir, 2005: 5).

A conversation: Researching gendered ceremony and ritual in parliaments

In June 2009, John Bercow presided over the British House of Commons in his first session as Speaker. For the British press, there was not a great deal to be said about the performance of his duties aside from his decision to wear a business suit, tie and plain black academic gown. In doing so, Bercow eschewed the ‘traditional’ court dress of his predecessors, not wearing tights or a wig. In fact, his immediate predecessor, Michael Martin, had not worn tights either, and Betty Boothroyd abandoned the wig in 1992. So it was Bernard ‘Jack’ Weatherill, Speaker between 1983 and 1992, who last wore full court dress. The Times turned to the family tailoring business, Bernard Weatherill of Savile Row, for a reaction to Bercow’s sartorial decision in 2009. The managing director commented that, ‘were ‘‘Jack’’ Weatherill still alive, he would say that it is at your peril if you underestimate the dress of office’. He suggested that Bercow should have continued to uphold the ‘better traditions of parliament’ (Malvern, 2009). What might such seemingly trivial debates over dress tell us about the serious business of parliamentary democracy? What constructions of gender, class or race might be encoded in such performances? What does wig-wearing do to the wearer or mean to his or her audience? The Leverhulme Trust-funded research programme, Gendered Ceremony and Ritual in Parliaments (GCRP), aims to answer such questions and highlight the seriousness of the symbolic in politics. The programme examines how struggles

Disrupting Deliberation? Comparing Repertoires of Parliamentary Representation in India, the UK and South Africa

In this chapter, we explore the phenomenon of disruptive behaviour by Members of Parliament (MPs) during parliamentary debates. We comparatively examine disruptive performances by MPs in their institutional contexts to understand the relationship between parliament and elected representatives and the performance of deliberation and representation. We focus on the three selected cases of India, South Africa and the United Kingdom, all of which have witnessed disruptive behaviour in their national parliaments but with varying form, frequency, severity and institutional response and with varied meaning and significance attributed.1

Contesting South Asian modernities: an introduction to the annual conference edition of the British Association for South Asian Studies

This Editorial introduces the papers in this special conference issue of Contemporary South Asia, placing them in the context of the 24th British Association for South Asian Studies (BASAS) annual conference, held at the University of Warwick in March 2010. The conference theme was ‘Landscapes of the imagination’, and the papers in this Special Issue reflect a range of approaches to this theme, in terms of methodology, topic and regional spread. Despite their diversity, however, the papers do reflect a common concern to contest a singular, unproblematic and unified experience of South Asian modernity.