Black Friday

- Dasu Krishnamoorty

Friday witnessed a tragedy comparable only to the Gujarat earthquake, not in physical terms but in terms of decay of values, which keep a civil society alive and vibrant. The passage of the railway budget in the Lok Sabha without any discussion heralds a bizarre chapter in Parliament's history and indicates the end of statesmanship so characteristic of the Nehru era.

The war of egos and nerves between the ruling National Democratic Alliance and the Congress has ended in consequences extremely difficult to quantify or evaluate. Immediately visible is the erosion of the dignity of Parliament and the office of the Speaker, indicating that the time has come to determine who is responsible to whom for paralysing business in both houses and physically preventing debate. People have begun asking themselves if they had made the right electoral choices.

The victor is Tehelka.com, which ran away with the maximum ad mileage in the minimum period, thanks to the Congress' fixation with an overpowering desire to return to power by hook or crook. The BJP and its allies did no better by rejecting the Opposition demand for an inquiry by a joint select committee after rashly promising one in the beginning. [Editor: Is the congress in deep-sleep while Prime Minister declared single-judge inquiry few weeks back? Why didn’t they propose JP inquiry all these days when PM was asking “tell us what kind of inquiry you want”? Does each of the congress parliamentarian’s body functioning need shouting so many days before they speak any word?] Together they wrote the obituary of debate and decency.

Yet, the NDA will stay put in office; the Congress will return to the streets to reap the maximum advantage of NDA's obduracy in the campaign for assembly elections. The people are the losers whose life and death concerns have been shelved, casually, for another session of Parliament. Suicide-prone weavers and farmers in Andhra Pradesh can wait; quake victims in Gujarat can wait; indeed, the entire country can wait for what is their due. Not the Congress, which has found a very unethical way of overcoming the discomfiture of occupying the Opposition benches.

Parliament is the supreme symbol of a free and democratic society. It is the institutionalised voice of the people to articulate their demands, to express views on the performance of the government and to demand explanation for its failures and inadequacies and more importantly to make laws for their empowerment. The people speak and act through their elected representatives. The budget is emblematic of the government’s answerability to Parliament and through it to the people. If discussion on that document is stalled or foiled through the kind of tactics a section of the Congress (now egged on by the Rashtriya Janata Dal) is adopting, it amounts to denying the people the opportunity to know how public funds have been spent and for what purpose. A guillotine is a gag on the voice of the people and renders meaningless the expensive exercise of holding elections. Far-reaching amendments to legislation such as altering labour laws making retrenchment easy or reducing government's stake in public sector banks to a minority holding of 33% will be rushed through without opposition. It also is equivalent to taking people's consent for granted. The stalling tactics of the Opposition will deprive people of the means to evaluate the consequences of the removal of quantitative restriction on the import of 715 items. In one sense, the Congress is providing an alibi for the government to avoid a debate on crucial issues.

Of greater relevance is the voluntary abdication by the Opposition of the power to use the supreme people's forum to call

the government to account on Tehelka and sundry scams in accordance with acknowledged parliamentary practice. Fourteen days (upto and including Friday) of Parliament's time has been wasted and who is responsible for this? Every hour of a Parliament session swallows Rs. 10 lakhs of public funds. Can people impose faith in such parties to assume power and govern with any degree of responsibility and efficiency? If they have let down the people this time, is there a guarantee that they will not do the same when they come to power? The role of the Opposition is not to destabilise an administration from the first day of its office. The no-confidence motion is a constitutional weapon provided to the Opposition to debate the performance of a government and defeat it by mobilising support from the disgruntled elements in the treasury benches. Noise and disorder are no substitute to well-informed debates nor agitation can take precedence over discussion. It is such impatience of the Congress with democratic functioning that inflicted on the nation the now infamous Emergency.

When Parliament reassembled on Monday to continue its budget session, all parties abjured their political identities to pay homage to the late Devi Lal, former Deputy Prime Minister. That is how death intervened to provide a brief reprieve to the drama of Opposition obstructionism, which began with the budget session. When Parliament met again the next day, the Congress party re-started the weird game all over, throwing the budget agenda into jeopardy. This has been like this since the National Democratic Alliance's ascent to power. The first few days of every session of Parliament would be disrupted on issues not of immediate or even remote relevance to the needs of the millions of voters who look up to Parliament to discuss matters which concern their humdrum lives. For a long time it was the Babri Masjid or some issue concerning the minorities which was good enough pretext for the Opposition to invade the well of the Speaker or stage a sit-in or simply raise the decibel level in the House and block its proceedings. Now it is the Tehelka scam which has overtaken minorities' concerns as a political priority that cannot wait for its logical end.

When Parliament adjourned for three weeks on 23 March,

Congress took the fight onto the streets, staging dharnas, rallies and black flag demonstrations. It also raised the Tehelka issue in State legislatures where it was in opposition. It launched noisy programmes where edited versions of the Tehelka tapes with transcripts were shown to party cadres. The cry for the resignation of the Prime Minister hit the roof. But when Parliament resumed the recessed budget session on 16 April, the Congress brought the street show right into the House, this time without the support of other Opposition parties. The party became desperate after the NDA had provided ample evidence of its unwillingness to submit to the former's demand for resignation. Home Minister L.K. Advani told his party MPs at the end of the first part of the budget session that the government would not quit since it enjoyed the confidence of the majority of the MPs in the Lok Sabha. Congress also boycotted meetings of the parliamentary standing committees which met to discuss ministry-wise budget provisions. These meetings were attended by leaders of other opposition parties. Thus began the isolation of the Congress in its disruptionist campaign.

In an attempt to break the deadlock, Speaker Balayogi

convened meeting after meeting of leaders of all parties on a daily basis but nothing came out of such meetings where he repeatedly appealed to all parties to end the ugly and costly impasse. The Congress, however, hardened its stance after the government had passed on to the CBI Subramaniam Swamy's charges against its president Sonia Gandhi and continued to insist on an inquiry by a joint parliamentary committee into the Tehelka scam before it would allow the House to discuss any other matter. It is true that the NDA had promised to order any kind of probe that the Opposition wanted into the Tehelka scam. However, confident of its majority in the House, the NDA now refused to do so in spite of the Congress withdrawing its demand for Vajpayee's resignation. In its filibustering, the Congress won over Rashtriya Janata Dal leader Laloo Prasad Yadav.

There is some uncertainty now about when or whether the standoff would end. If the government decides to push through the Finance Bill next week and succeeds, it will mean another gag on discussion. The railway ministry gets Rs 66,000 crores, without a single question being asked about new railway lines, or about Mamata Banerjee's largesse to her constituents in West Bengal. The result of such a step has been visualised by an editorial in the Indian Express a decade ago in these words: "Year after year, the Lok Sabha fails to complete its proper job of examining the budgetary demands of a majority of Union Government ministries and departments and passes them without discussion because of lack of time. There has been an increasing resort to the guillotine over the years even as business of Government has become both more extensive and more complicated. Thus, there is less and less well-informed monitoring of the Government's work and of Parliament's imprint on expenditure, administration, and policy. Other parliamentary procedures such as questions and call-attention motions are no substitute for the opportunity which debates on departmental budgetary demands provide to elicit ministerial information about or explanations for the policies being pursued." The newly formed People's Front warned: "In view of the anti-farmer, anti-worker and anti-people content of the budget, it is imperative that the same should not be rushed through."

In the absence of the power of numbers in the House, the opposition has several avenues open to them to focus the attention of the people on the misdeeds of the government. What happened to Indira Gandhi's emergency? She was forced to call for elections as public opinion, in addition to censure from international forums, became impossible to ignore. Bringing methods of street warfare into the sacred premises of legislatures is a body blow to democracy operating through the parliamentary system.

Technically, the NDA government has a right to decide on what kind

of inquiry it should order if it had not promised a JPC inquiry earlier. Yet, if it had not done so, it does not automatically confer a right on the Congress opposition to block Parliament's legitimate business, which again by implication is the business of the people. The refusal of the government amounts to an admission of irregularities in defence deals and that is a sort of victory for the Congress. Government has set up a commission of inquiry; the defence minister has resigned; Jaya Jetley of the Samata Party has resigned; Trinamool Congress has left the alliance. If this is not an admission of guilt, what else is? Everyone now is the loser, the government, the Congress, the people and Parliament as an institution. Correctives to such a situation can now come only from outside Parliament. The abrupt adjournment of the House is a sad commentary on the conciliatory skills of NDA's managers of parliamentary affairs. Tehelka is an afterthought for the Congress because if Tehelka was not there, it and other left parties would have surely raised a marginal matter such as the charges against Sonia Gandhi as a major issue and stalled the proceedings of the House.

Opposition parties in State legislatures are flattering these wayward MPs by imitation. The ugly spectacle of Uttar Pradesh legislators uprooting mikes to use them as sticks is still green in the minds of the people, thanks to TV. Speakers of both Parliament and State legislatures should meet and find out how they can discipline members bent on disruption of the legislative business as a token of protest. Is it possible to treat the presence of riotous groups as absence and declare a bill or a motion or resolution as approved? There have been occasions when opposition groups have been expelled from the House and parliamentary business carried on in their absence. If the NDA exults over this transient victory (the passage of the railway budget) it must be a very short-sighted and naive alliance. What happened on Friday is a victory for none, neither for parliamentary propriety, nor for any political party nor for the country as a whole. It is a tragedy without parallel in the half-century-old Parliament's history.

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