Temple of democracy needs its deity back

WHAT is Parliament without parliamentarians but a gaushala without gaumata or a temple without a deity! Before the offence-taking mob lynches me for offending Right Honourable members or the venerated gaumata, please note that I didn’t refer to members of Parliament here. The deity here is indeed debate and the mantra is the verbal duel — the give-and-take of ideas and arguments. Taking the metaphor of the temple further, there is actually no worship of this deity without its high priest, the Opposition with a capital O.

This government seems to have done a cost-benefit analysis of two kinds of embarrassments — of adjournments and suspensions — and come to the conclusion of opting for the latter to avoid the former.

So, this winter session of Parliament ended with the high priests sitting out in the sun and mimicking their presiding officer — the Rajya Sabha chairman, who is also the country’s Vice President. When you are out in the sun with no work and a mobile phone, what can you do other than taking selfies or recording each other’s pouts and performances? Yet, even by a single-party-dominated government’s standards, the suspension of 146 Opposition MPs is a breathtaking blow to the very idea of parliamentary debate.

If Parliament is meant only for government business and if the Opposition benches have to be cleared out for laws to be made amid the thumping of the treasury desks, what good is our democracy? How can the foreign press and foreign-funded commentators be blamed if they start calling this ‘Made in India Parliament 2.0’ a sham? The Opposition’s cuts and jabs, slings and slights, walkouts and adjournments lend legitimacy to the law-making process. When a Bill is finally passed after all the din of heated disagreements, it rightly acquires the gravitas of the law of the land. Like the new Parliament building, the new law-making process should not be robbed of the grandeur it deserves in an effort to become efficient and contemporary.

For, the new building has been proven to be inefficient when it comes to stopping intruders from getting inside with smoke canisters inside the sole of shoes and then jumping down from the visitors’ gallery into the House. That was an invasion of the sanctum sanctorum of our Parliament.

This writer was in the Parliament building on December 13, 2001, when it was attacked. When all the attackers were killed in the fierce encounter in which eight brave security personnel and a civilian employee laid down their lives, then Home Minister LK Advani and Law Minister Arun Jaitley went around the premises to assess the situation; and one remembers asking Advani about the security breach.

And Advani did make a statement in the Lok Sabha on December 18, 2001 (The Tribune’s columnist and supercop Julio Ribeiro inadvertently made a mistake on Friday when he referred to the BJP being in the Opposition during those days), accusing perpetrators at home and in Pakistan for launching the attack on the Indian Parliament. This time, too, the Opposition wanted a similar statement. Of course, there is no comparison between the attack that killed five Pakistani terrorists inside the Parliament complex and the use of smoke canisters by intruders. History was repeating itself as farce, if at all it can be termed a repeat.

But the canisters could have easily contained some deadly gas, which would have seriously compromised the nation’s top leadership at one go. This is a scary thought, but this apprehension, however, was not allayed by the government with a reassuring debate. The Opposition members were right in demanding a detailed account of the security lapses and the possible remedial measures. Parliament belongs to them, too. Instead, they were suspended one after another. Herein lies a marked change in statecraft. Earlier, the Opposition had immense leeway in steering parliamentary proceedings.

A big exposé in a newspaper was good enough for the Opposition to force an adjournment of the House. And there was no greater recognition of a journalist’s work than his news story leading to an adjournment to be followed by a debate in the House. This writer has always considered the three separate instances of parliamentary adjournments over his exposés to be his biggest badges of honour, bigger than any journalism award. When the entire Opposition as one would stand up flashing newspapers and raising slogans, the presiding officer used to relent and adjourn the House; this, in turn, would become the next day’s headlines. The greater the Opposition pressure, the bigger the compromises, which could even be as big as Joint Parliamentary Committee probes.

This Opposition tactic could be termed parliamentary bargain or even blackmail. For the government to do legislative business, it had to listen to the Opposition’s demands. Thereby, every exposé (and at times, motivated plants from within the government or by corporate lobbyists) or an event had a life of its own, making the government often look weak, wobbly and putting it perpetually on the defensive. This has changed. Instead of succumbing to the Opposition pressure and letting it run away with the parliamentary agenda, the government has devised a counter-tactic — the suspension of slogan-shouting MPs.

Sure, the suspension of Opposition MPs does cause embarrassment and make the government look undemocratic. But this government seems to have done a cost-benefit analysis of two kinds of embarrassments — of adjournments and suspensions — and come to the conclusion of opting for the latter to avoid the former. Adjournments make a government appear guilty and vulnerable, whereas suspensions make it seem autocratic, brazen and strong (rather terribly so). It is a no-brainer that the present dispensation doesn’t mind this perception, or rather has got so used to these epithets to even consider them as brickbats.

However, the security breach was an occasion that called for the government accepting the mistakes of the strange Parliament security personnel, who would just sit and frisk (and they haven’t changed this old habit). Then, sadly, the “strong” government did not make an exception to expose the chinks in its armour. The government needs to rethink its parliamentary tactic to bring the deity of discourse back to the temple of democracy.