G-RAM-G vs MGNREGA
THE GREAT GAME: There was no real explanation why the law was being overhauled, both in word or deed
PRIME Minister Narendra Modi chose the Ethiopian Parliament over the Indian Parliament, Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi was spotted riding a fancy bike in Munich when he should have been debating several important issues facing the country in the Lok Sabha and External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar was in Israel instead of in the Rajya Sabha. With three key leaders missing from the House this winter session this week, you could wonder : Is the irrelevance of Parliament complete?
It was a short session, one of the shortest in recent history, but it has had no dearth of important legislations — among the most important, the G-RAM-G Bill relating to wages for 125 days of work per family per year, that was passed the day before the session ended. The Treasury benches always had the numbers, so there was never any doubt that G-RAM-G would replace MGNREGA, no matter how many protests the Congress undertook in front of the Gandhi statue outside Parliament.
The Opposition also asked why the name of the Bill was being changed — why the first two letters in the acronym, MG, or Mahatma Gandhi, were being overwritten by RAM, when the government could have chosen any other letters in the alphabet. Agriculture Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, who otherwise did a fine job of piloting the Bill, didn’t have a proper answer. The Parliament resounded with speeches about Gandhi’s “ram rajya” ideal, about his devotion to the god himself — but there was no real explanation why MGNREGA was being overhauled, both in word or deed.
The interesting thing is that G-RAM-G had an earlier incarnation which lasted only 24 hours. It was called the Pujya Bapu Gramin Rozgar Yojana, an approximate Hindi translation of the English original, Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. Clearly, the BJP decided to replace Mahatma Gandhi, or Pujya Bapu, with the RAM acronym.
Why? We don’t know. Some would say, What’s in a name, after all? Some might answer, Everything. That there is a significance to the attempted erasing of Bapu, nearly 78 years after his death, the significance of which we may not even understand.
The Gandhi mother-daughter pair raised slogans and marched outside the House, but it was all a bit like Humpty Dumpty. Meanwhile the Gandhi heir-apparent, besides riding a TVS 450cc bike being built in partnership with BMW in Munich, the party put out, was also meeting Indian Overseas Congress politicians to discuss “strategies to expand the party’s ideological outreach.” The question that remains is, in which country.
Only a few months ago, Rahul had decided to fly to South America to expand the party, instead of fighting the good fight in the Bihar election. This week he seems to have found his feet in Germany.
Surely the charade that is the Opposition these days is ringing its own death knell. Certainly, if this goes on a bit longer, it will soon not just be impossible to put the Congress party together again, it will be fatal.
We know by now that the PM was missing in action in Parliament because the free trade agreement with Oman was ready to be signed — the second after the UK — but it’s still not clear why Ethiopia and Jordan couldn’t have waited. King Hussein of Jordan visited India two years ago; a return visit could have taken place any other time. As for Ethiopia, well, while the Chinese haven’t built the Ethiopian Parliament building where Modi was invited to speak, they have built the African Union headquarters, also in Addis Ababa, close by.
In fact, the Communist Party of China has built 15 Parliament buildings across Africa, such is their dedication to democracy.
In any case, Modi was this week awarded the highest civilian honours of Ethiopia and Oman — they are his 28th and 29th international awards. Meanwhile, as Rahul holidayed in Germany, the Congress absent-mindedly stormed the well of the House. But it was the Trinamool Congress, not the Indian National Congress, that sat on the steps of the Parliament for large parts of the night in Delhi’s winter chill on Thursday night, protesting the passage of G-RAM-G.
Leave alone the irrelevance of Parliament, the irrelevance of the Congress and its consequent fading from the national political scene is probably the most important event this week. It is happening before our eyes and there’s no one to arrest the haemorrhaging. J&K Chief Minister Omar Abdullah, a good friend of the Gandhis, put it succinctly when he recently said that the INDIA bloc is on life support.
Even Priyanka Gandhi’s wonderfully spoken interventions in Hindi in the Lok Sabha, interspersed with her sweet smiles, were as flat as yesterday’s chapatis. Asking Nitin Gadkari for an appointment to discuss the state of the road from “Chandigarh to Shimla” — en route to her house in Mashobra, close to Shimla, which she has built on land she got special exemption from the Himachal Cabinet to buy — is all very well, but it’s hardly the nuts and bolts of hardcore politics.
If the BJP is, indeed, turning the country into a one-party state, as public intellectuals like Pratap Bhanu Mehta have recently argued, the fact remains that the entitled, effete and privileged leadership of the country’s largest Opposition party is allowing the BJP to do so. They simply don’t care.
You can hear the — mostly muted — rumbling of the Congress cadres. Mohammed Moquim, a former MLA from Odisha, made brave enough to tell Sonia Gandhi that he tried to meet her son for three years, but to no avail. The stranglehold around the Gandhis is so complete, it is said, that if you don’t have access to KC Venugopal, Alappuzha MP and powerful party general secretary, then you don’t matter.
That’s why, as you enter a brave, new year, Gandhi’s maxim that “India also lives in its states” will be even more valid. Elections in Assam, West Bengal, Kerala and Tamil Nadu will define the republic in 2026. The whole won’t still be a sum of its parts, because the BJP will fight for every inch of political mind-space. Still, it would help for the Congress to learn a thing or two from the TMC, the DMK and the CPM — how to fight, and possibly, even to win.
2026 will be a deciding year. Is the Congress capable of clawing back?
