House of discord

For nearly half a century the Parliament of the world’s largest democracy has been disrupted regularly, often on a daily basis, and through such ugly means as drowning the proceedings in constant noise or rowdiness in the Well of the House. Neither the deserved condemnation of this nor the solemn pledge to maintain order and decorum taken by all MPs on the 50th anniversary of Independence has made the slightest dent in the seemingly endless menace. On the contrary, Parliament reached its nadir in the last session of the 15th Lok Sabha when the Congress-led United Progressive All-iance was in power. The Bharatiya Janata Party-led Opposition kept on screaming throughout the day and yet, amidst deafening din, important bills were passed without a minute’s discussion.

But then, suddenly, the Opposition discovered that it didn’t need to do anything. For the task of obstructing Parliament’s work had been taken over by the ruling Congress Party’s members from Andhra, infuriated by their state’s bifurcation to create a separate state of Telangana. So much so that one of the protesting MPs used a pepper-spray inside the House and another brought in a knife though he later denied having done so.

Against this bleak backdrop it is doubly tragic that any hope of things improving in the 16th Lok Sabha has already been delivered a big blow. Mercifully, late on Monday evening the disruption of the Rajya Sabha because of the unresolved dispute over some appalling and unacceptable remarks of Union minister of state Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti at an election rally in Delhi ended after vice-president Hamid Ansari, who is also chairman of the Upper House, read a “consensus statement” appealing to all members to “maintain civility at all costs in public discourse”.

This should have happened much earlier but didn’t because of the obstinacy of both sides, the ruling BJP, and the nine Opposition parties that jointly have a clear majority in the Rajya Sabha. The sequence of events was sordid. In the first place, the word “haramzadas” the errant sadhvi had used for all opponents of the BJP, to distinguish them from her own party’s members whom she called “Ramzadas” (children of Lord Ram), is abominable, not just appalling. It really means “b******s”, not just “illegitimate”.

When the issue burst in Parliament, Prime Minister Narendra Modi chose not to be present. Some senior ministers said that at a party meeting Mr Modi had “strongly disapproved” of the language used, whereupon the minister concerned offered a rather ambivalent apology. This, the BJP leaders declared magisterially, was the “end of the matter”. Yet they continued to use lame excuses, such as that the sadhvi was a “village woman of extremely humble origins” and therefore deserved sympathy. One senior minister went so far as to say that the unacceptable remark of hers was, in fact, a “slip of the tongue”. But it was soon established that the gallant defender was on slippery ground. Several newspapers reminded him that the sadhvi had used exactly the same expression at a public meeting in Lucknow in March. This made the Opposition in both Houses more insistent than before in demanding her resignation or dismissal.

The treasury benches rejected this demand vehemently. The Opposition in the Rajya Sabha demanded the Prime Minister’s presence. He took three days to do so, and his position remained that the matter was over. Thereafter, the strident standoff between the two sides began because the ruling BJP refused to accept even the suggestion that a resolution to denounce the use of foul language without mentioning anyone’s name be passed.

No useful purpose will be served by appor-tioning blame, but both sides need to be warned that a repetition of what has just ended would make the next four and a half years of the present Parliament as disor-derly as the previous two Parliaments during the last decade. The reason for this should be evident. For, except during the tenure of Atal Behari Vajpayee when there was communication and cooperation between him and the Leader of the Opposition, Sonia Gandhi — the then Prime Minister’s powerful principal secretary Brajesh Mishra and Mrs Gandhi’s confidant K. Natwar Singh constituted the channel — disruption of Parliament was directly proportional to the level of mutual dislike between the two major parties which, sad to say, sometimes bordered on hatred. Come to think of it, even before the present problem arose there was much bad blood between the two sides.

The Congress, shaken by its shattering defeat and unable to do much to revive itself, is understandably furious over Mr Modi’s repeatedly proclaimed objec-tive: to have a “Congress mukt Bharat (India rid of the Congress)”. It will therefore do all it can to use every opportunity it gets to hurt or embarrass the BJP. And what can be a better opportunity than the one offered on a platter by the ruling party itself, Niranjan Jyoti’s case being the first? More such occasions are likely to arise because, while Mr Modi has full control on his government, he is either unwilling or unable or both, to even censure, leave alone punish, the Hindutva hotheads, especially those belonging to other members of the Sangh Parivar that are determined to make provocative, polarising and poisonous statements. They enjoy the protection of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh of which the BJP is only the political face.

As it happens, a former BJP minister, Swami Chinmayananda, has publicly used the H-word against Imam Bukhari of Jama Masjid for advertising his connection with Bukhara. The BJP’s allies in Tamil Nadu, including the one who has walked out of the alliance, have denounced foreign minister Sushma Swaraj’s plea for declaring the Gita as the “national scripture”. This propensity is bound to multiply and thus cause ruckus both among the people and within Parliament.
All political parties must introspect and decide whether they should end what Mr Ansari had once described as “competitive hooliganism”.