WHERE NECESSITY ENDS AND INDULGENCE BEGINS

 Excerpts from 'Politicians Paid More For Less Work' by Prabhu Chawla in the New Sunday Express of 23.08.2026

Aristotle believed that the strength of a republic ultimately rested on the character of those who governed it. 

Montesquieu warned that political power, left unchecked, had a natural tendency to expand beyond proper limits.

Edmund Burke, while defending the independence of elected representatives, reminded them that they owed their electors not merely their jobs but their judgement.

Nearly two and a half centuries after Burke, India's democracy has arrived at a rather different question. How much should the people have to pay for those who exercise power in their name?

John Locke believed that the purpose of government was to preserve the rights  of those who entrusted it with power. Burke saw representative government as a solemn understanding between the elected and the elector. 

Neither imagined that democracy would one day acquire the institutional paraphernalia of a corporate establishment, with its own hierarchy of salaries,allowances, vehicles, houses and privileges.

It is the truth that a facility meant to enable public service can easily become a perk which, once granted, has a remarkable tendency to become an entitlement. The citizen is meanwhile expected to accept that public expenditure must be restrained, subsidies must be rationalised and government departments must economise. The contrast is becoming increasingly difficult to defend.

Governments change, parties change and political rhetoric changes, yet once power is acquired, the political class appears to rediscover a common fraternity. Better cars,better houses, better salaries and better facilities for those who occupy legislatures. The citizen is perpetually reminded of fiscal prudence and the legislator, rather more often, of what the public purse can provide.

The real issue is whether the compensation attached to public office bears any relationship to the responsibilities discharged by those who receive it. 

The paradox is that the political class has become more expensive while the legislature itself has become less deliberative. 

State assemblies have, on an average, been meeting only for a fraction of an year. But when legislative time diminishes while political privileges expand, the citizen is entitled to ask whether the two trends can coexist. 

However there is an irony. The Indian voter is perhaps the most unforgiving auditor of political performance. Sitting legislators are routinely defeated. Anti-incumbency remains one of the most powerful weapon in Indian electoral politics. Yet the citizen has no effective mechanism to demand an account of what happens with the deployment of public funds. What is urgently needed is the establishment of  a credible compact between privilege and performance.

The danger that looms large is that political privilege will gradually become normalised across segements until nobody remebers to ask where necessity ends and indulgence begins. The language of public service can then become a convenient vocabulary for private comfort, while the tax payer is left to finance an increasingly elborate architecture of poiwer. 

Democracy cannot be adjudged by how generously it treats those who govern. It must ultimately be judged by how responsibly those who govern treat the money, institutions and the trust placed in their hands.

While going through the entire article, it was felt parallels could be drawn with the happenings in a Church for the past couple of years. It is left to the viewers to discern.