Politics over terror

One more all-party meeting will try to end the stalemate in Parliament. With the Congress and the Left sticking to their demand for the resignations of BJP leaders Sushma Swaraj, Vasundhara Raje and Shivraj Singh Chouhan and the Modi government ruling out the resignations, it is hard to see any positive outcome from Monday's meeting. The Congress had stayed away from the last all-party meeting called with the same agenda. Nothing has changed since then. In fact, some recent developments have rather soured the relations between the ruling and opposition parties.

It is not clear what purpose Home Minister Rajnath Singh was trying to achieve by provoking a needless controversy over "Hindu terrorism". If the UPA Home Minister used that offensive expression, it was a clumsy formulation, intended to show that terror activities were not confined to Islamic groups. But where was the need to revive it post-Gurdaspur? It is well accepted by the civilized sections of society that terrorists have no religion and they should not be identified with either their community or religion. Incidentally, did the Home Minister, or anyone in the BJP, ever object to terms like Muslim, Sikh or Tamil terrorism? Debates/ comments on emotive issues like terror should be carefully worded without any attempt to arouse passions or hurt sentiments. Politicians, however, cutting across party lines, are prone to loose talk - the latest entrant to the Hall of Shame being Tripura Governor Tathagata Roy. But power seems to have made BJP and Sangh Parivar leaders particularly insensitive and inconsiderate. Very often they say things which, on reflection, they might be regretting. Otherwise, how can a usually sober, even if dull, Home Minister like Rajnath Singh, who is known to measure his words before uttering them, stoop to political point-scoring over a sensitive subject, that too ahead of an all party-meeting?

The government needs opposition help to pass important laws. When the Opposition is bent on paralysing Parliament, the last thing the government should do is to annoy the Opposition by digging out past scams or silly statements unless it wants the logjam in Parliament to continue. Does it want cooperation or confrontation?