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Held to ransom

Unceasing bedlam has once again caused a session of Parliament to end without being able to conduct important business. A Parliament such as India’s, complete with arguments, protests, and walkouts, may be regarded as the inevitable expression of a vibrant, diverse, and highly divided polity. Yet when disruption overwhelms discussion, rendering both houses dysfunctional session after session, it might be time to press the alarm button. The Speaker of the Lok Sabha, Somnath Chatterjee, did just that in a speech he made before adjourning the house sine die. Distressed at having to preside over a house that had lost 42 working hours and a huge amount of public money in a single session, he wondered if all this did not raise “questions about the utility of our system of parliamentary democracy and about its future.” The Speaker’s anguish was the worse for not being able to convince MPs to accept a ‘no work, no pay’ rule: the August 23 proposal was rejected by all, barring the Left parties. Between August 10 and September 10, the Lok Sabha passed 10 bills, four of them without discussion because none was possible. For the same reason, the house could take up only two substantive issues for discussion — terrorism in the context of the deadly Hyderabad explosions, and the flood situation in various parts of the country. Several issues of vital public concern went undebated: the 123 agreement with the United States; the Rajinder Sachar committee’s recommendations on Muslim uplift; the deepening agrarian crisis; and the rise in the prices of essential commodities.

The principal opposition party must accept a large share of the blame for this unedifying state of affairs. Claiming once upon a time to be ‘the party with a difference’ for its supposed adherence to discipline, the Bharatiya Janata Party is now a byword for disorder and disruptive behaviour in Parliament, especially since its May 2004 electoral debacle. After its shock defeat, the BJP set new lows in parliamentary conduct, refusing even the minimal courtesies due to a newly sworn-in government. The ‘party with a difference’ disrupted the Prime Minister’s 2004 speech on the motion of thanks to the President; prevented Prime Minister Manmohan Singh from introducing his Ministers; and most shamefully, forced the UPA Government’s first budget to be passed without a discussion. The story continues three years on with the BJP disrupting the Prime Minister’s statement on the 123 civil nuclear agreement and repeatedly blocking a discussion on the subject. Could it be that the principal opposition party does not want to expose the discord within its own ranks? It is a tempting conclusion.

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