The final moments of the first budget session of the sixteenth Kerala Legislative Assembly on Tuesday seemed more like a repeat of an old rivalry that the State has witnessed multiple times than a ceremonial culmination of the session by a young Government. The Left Democratic Front, which has taken its seats on the Opposition benches for the first time in ten years, boycotted the House as it moved to clear a batch of bills relating to finance that the ruling United Democratic Front was pushing through without sending them to the subject committee for scrutiny. There was an element of irony in this for all of those in the chamber. In 2024, the Finance Bill was passed in under five minutes, along with three other bills, while in 2023, when under the LDF, an entire Finance Bill was passed in less than five minutes, without a single mention of a subject committee. The script has been flipped around and so has the attitude to defend procedural rigour only when it suits.

The immediate cause is procedural, but the subtext is fiscal and that's why this episode merits more than a blurb in the day's political briefs. The government in Kerala has seen a dramatic change of fortunes since May, when it came into being as an LDF coalition, which saw the number of seats drop from 99 to 35, and the CPI(M) alone seeing more than half of its votes collapse. The state exchequer handed over to Chief Minister V D Satheesan, who is also the finance minister, had total outstanding liabilities of about ₹5.07 lakh crore, which is almost 35.5 percent of GSP, according to the white paper submitted by his government. Of this, it is believed that the Kerala Infrastructure Investment Fund Board and the state's pension company account for an estimated ₹87,012 crore in borrowing, both of which were created by the previous government to hide borrowing from the state's formal books. In his revised Budget on June 19, Satheesan admitted a gap of around ₹20,500 crore compared to revenue assumptions made in the outgoing government's Budget in January, mostly owing to unrealistic expectations on grants and the devolution of central taxes. The reason the numbers are important is because they help to explain why both sides have reason to want and dread a more thorough review of the fine print in the finance bills that would enforce that Budget.

The subject committee is not a ceremonial tier in the Indian state legislatures. It is the place where members from outside the ruling front's inner sanctum sanctorum and a few from the treasury side are supposed to dissect a Bill, clause by clause, summon officials, seek written objections, and come up with a report either approving the draft or pointing to deficiencies that need rectification. For one thing, that is not a denial of the Opposition any platform for theater. It eliminates the one formal process for testing a tax or expenditure act before it is binding on households and firms. The worry is compounded in Kerala's case because the finance bills lumped with the ordinary provisions of the Budget contain a truly controversial item, a massive reduction of the order of 131 percent in the tax slab rate for low-alcohol drinks, including RTDs. Former Chief Minister and Opposition leader Pinarayi Vijayan has openly alleged that the move was done to favour one liquor company, but the government has said that the underlying tax category for low-strength drinks was established years ago by a previous government and the present Budget was only correcting the tax rate. Regardless which one turns out to be accurate, the motivation to refer the bill to a subject committee for scrutiny, to listen to industry submissions on, and to validate or unwind prior to the vote, and not after, is obvious.

In the eyes of Kerala's Assembly, this easily translates into a local antagonistic power struggle between two coalitions that are playing the same script, taking turns at the top. Make the frame just a little bigger and the pattern sounds familiar in legislatures not only in South India. The House of Commons in Britain has its own tried and tested jargon for the same device: the guillotine motion is the way in which time allotted for discussion on a bill is limited, and a vote is taken before everyone has had a chance to read all the clauses. So that individual items don't have to go through the kind of committee process they would have if introduced as standalone bills, the United States Congress often consolidates unrelated appropriations into a single bill at the end of a fiscal year. The European Parliament's trilogue procedure which takes place between the Council, Commission and Parliament negotiators with the full chamber only seeing the compromise draft for voting has faced similar criticism from transparency advocates, who say that by the time the compromise draft is sent to the full chamber for voting, meaningful amendment is de facto impossible. None of these are novel grievances and none of them have an elegant solution, because the source of the pressure is not personal but structural: in all the countries, the problems arise from the existence of fixed legislative agendas; in all, the opposition parties have an incentive to slow down business they cannot beat head on; in all, the best way to reconcile the two is to reduce the window for scrutiny, not to increase the time available.

The unique part of Kerala's version of this argument is the rapidity in which the assumptions can shift. Within weeks of relinquishing power, the party that, for a decade, argued that use of the guillotine was its only option in cases of opposition obstruction is making its own the same argument. That sort of turnaround usually takes the moral content out of institutional norms: both sides use or ignore procedure as a weapon they can pick up or put down as they see fit, depending on which side they are on. While it is not the case that a single missed committee stage eradicates a state's creditworthiness, every time that a legislature skips a step in the budget, investors and credit-rating analysts give it a subtle message on the scrutiny that any borrowing, guarantee or off-budget mechanism will be subject to in the future. Kerala already has one of the higher debt to GSDP ratio among the major states in India and the open market borrowing of Kerala is capped due to this reason. A finance department eager to explain as the present government claims it does that Kerala's fiscal management is on the verge of becoming more disciplined would have an easier job making that case with a legislature that appears to be testing its own swords instead of rushing through Bills in the final few moments of the session.

There is also a less-political governance argument that is often buried as the political jockeying begins. Like in most states in India, Kerala's subject committees are interparty and their recommendations are, in the past, given due consideration by the government and clauses are sometimes amended without a floor fight. But it only works if the bills actually are referred to committee with enough time for the process to play out, not tabled and disposed of on the same sitting day as the Budget wrap-up, which is how it seems to have been done here (with the session scheduled to be over by July 1). With any finance Bill once a government has determined that the Bill has to pass the House before the end of the calendar, the order of business is predetermined and the committee stage is more of a formality than anything else for the government in control of the calendar.

None of this indicates any illegality on the part of the government; rules of Parliament in Kerala, as elsewhere in Westminster-based legislatures, provide a significant degree of flexibility as to how business is distributed in the last weeks of a session, and there is a history of courts being hesitant to interfere in the internal working of legislatures. The two tests are different, however, and a government which had pledged to be more transparent with the state's finances, and which had commissioned its own white paper, has an obvious interest in not being seen to treat scrutiny as disposable when it becomes inconvenient. The Opposition's boycott is likely to die down in days and get lost in the running debate between the two sides on who is responsible for the debt burden of Kerala. The question it raises whether the committee scrutiny in the State Legislature is a real check on fiscal legislation or a formality that both the parties give up when the clock ticks will still remain the next time a government in Kerala has to rush to finish a session before its financial bills are thoroughly examined.