India is widely known for its decades-old parliamentary tradition. But now this very tradition is under threat.
After mere 14 months in office, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government is being accused of murdering democracy. His ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is at loggerheads with the opposition, led by the Congress, whose 25, out of 44, parliamentarians in the Lok Sabha have been suspended for five days for their unruly behavior in the house.
Though the order came from Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan, but everything in the current governance flows from the uni-polar power structure of Modi.
Suspension of the lawmakers is unprecedented in the Indian parliamentary history, which prompted Congress President Sonia Gandhi to call it as “a black day for Indian democracy.”
Her son, and party vice president, Rahul Gandhi, also cried foul and pledged that his party would be undeterred by the government’s acts and would continue with its agitation against the government action.
PM Modi, charges the opposition, is blandly following the “Gujarat model,” a reference to the western state of Gujarat where Modi served as the chief minister for 13 years till May 2014 before becoming the prime minister.
Shatisinh Gohil, a prominent Congress leader and now a national spokesperson of the party who served as the opposition leader in the Gujarat assembly during Modi’s tenure as chief minister, pulled no punches when he targeted Modi directly for replicating at the national level what he had been doing in the Gujarat assembly.
“Between 2002 and 2013, as chief minister of Gujarat, there was not a single budget session (of the state assembly) when he did not suspend opposition MLAs. Earlier, there weren’t any such instances of suspending opposition MLAs with such frequency,” Gohil said.
This points to a political malaise of the current Indian political system.
The Congress has not been able to take its defeat at the hands of the Modi-led BJP just as the BJP could not digest its inability to defeat Congress during the two previous general elections in 2004 and 2009. For Modi’s part, he still shows that it has not sink in on him that he is the prime minister and thus needs to have a much larger mind and vision.
This is the bane of Indian politics. The opposition party forgets that it may become government one day and the ruling party forgets that it may get mauled in the next election and may not even get the formal status of a full-fledged opposition as what happened with the Congress 14 months ago.
The ongoing Monsoon session is a washout thus far and threatens to remain so till August 13, the last day of the current session. This is because the Congress, the principal opposition party, has been demanding resignation of Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj and Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje for allegedly helping out illegally former cricket czar Lalit Modi in getting his travel documents from the UK government.
Besides, the Congress party has also been rooting for axing Shivraj Singh Chauhan, the beleaguered chief minister of the BJP-ruled Madhya Pradesh, for his alleged sins of omission and commission in the Vyapam scam.
The government has said “no” to the opposition demands and has decided to brazen it out. Herein lies the crux of the current parliamentary logjam that India is facing currently.
However, the Modi government has achieved just the opposite. The government’s tactics in Parliament have brought about a rare opposition unity which was not there before. In many ways, the Modi government has scored a self goal in this context.
The washout of the current monsoon session costs the exchequer $40 million. But that is peanuts for the $2 trillion Indian economy. At stake here is the Indian parliamentary democracy which is priceless.
The Modi government is forgetting that it cannot muzzle the opposition without political attrition. It cannot replicate the so-called “Gujarat model” at the national level without being seen as a villain.
When the BJP was in opposition it had routinely stalled parliamentary proceedings for several reasons and almost 700 hours of Parliament were washed out because of the BJP shenanigans. Now the Congress is paying back the BJP in the same coin.
The Modi government needs to turn a new leaf and needs to win over the opposition amicably. After all, the last parliamentary session was the most productive session and the opposition needs to be given its due for making that happen.
