A topsy-turvy situation for Parliament

The latest joke doing the rounds in Parliament, in the form of SMSes, is an ad for Maggi noodles. Put the Maggi noodles and water in a pan, it says.  Then turn on  the Lok Sabha channel. Wait till the Speaker arrives in the House and takes her seat.

Immediately put the pan on the fire and turn on the flame. Take the pan off the moment she adjourns the House. In two minutes,  your Maggi noodles are ready  to be served!

The functioning of the Rajya Sabha is being summed up in four simple words: “Gyarah, Barah, Do and Go”.(The house meets at 11,  is adjourned a couple of moments later till 12. Again it meets at noon, and is adjourned yet again till 2 pm, with the same story repeated at 2 pm.)

As the monsoon session of Parliament goes for a toss, with hardly any business transacted during the last one month,  the MPs meet and look forward to exchanging the latest jokes.

Last week,  a senior NDA leader hurrying out of the Parliament building, quipped that he was going home to  prepare “for the evening debate”, since “now the debate  takes place on the box, not in the House”.  He had to do serious  preparation for what he was going to say,  to pore over the CAG report,  collate facts and figures on coal policy and  marshal his arguments about the scam.

The sight of a  Manish Tewari valiantly defending Subodh Kant Sahay in what was  obviously a bad case and a Ravi Shankar Prasad lampooning his defence has become a familiar sight in the drawing rooms across the country every night. The trouble is that the debate is confined only to a few spokespersons, and is not wide-ranging as would have happened in Parliament, drawing  in smaller parties, who would have their own perspective.

For some years now, the executive had abdicated some of its responsibilities to the judiciary which has held forth on issues which should normally fall in the government’s  domain.
And now,  it is Parliament which is fast ceding its space to  the media, and parliamentarians their role to the TV channels. The debates, whether it is the allocation of coal blocks  or promotion in jobs for the SCs and STs, are being held on TV channels, disallowed as they are in Parliament, where engagement is supposed to take place. 

Today it is the BJP which is disrupting the Houses — and this time, it has gone one step further, by expressing its view that nothing will come out of a debate, or a JPC or a PAC, thereby almost  expressing its no-confidence in Parliament and its instrumentalities. Yesterday, it was  the Congress.

Again, it is the journos — not the government or its  investigating agencies — who are taking the reports of the CAG seriously, following it up with their own investigations. One TV channel unearthed how Union minister Subodh Kant Sahay had written to the prime minister making a case for the allocation of a coal block to a company associated with his brother, and  it was sanctioned two days later.  Another revealed how relatives of coal minister Sriprakash Jaiswal had came to benefit through the allocations, though he was not coal minister at the time.

Small wonder then that the media should get more powerful, a development about which the political class feels so aggrieved, and there is a cry from time to time on the need to regulate it.
It goes without saying that the tactic of disruption negates the very essence of parliamentary functioning. Take the CAG report on Coal. It is normally  sent to the public accounts committee of Parliament for scrutiny before it is discussed in  the houses— or accepted as final. This time, because of the uproar by the BJP, which refused to let Parliament function till the prime minister had put in his papers, the PM broke with convention and made a statement in both  houses of Parliament. And because he made a statement, in which he refuted the findings of the CAG, and its calculation of a presumptive loss of  Rs 1.86 lakh crore,  it has ironically reduced the efficacy of the PAC, even though it is headed by a BJP leader. Once the chief executive has taken a position, the secretaries who depose  before the PAC in the coming days  will find it that much more difficult to take a line that is different from the PM’s.

Had the BJP been resorting to the disruption tactic for the first time to draw the country’s attention to a scam, it might have been forgiven.

It is incomprehensible why a discussion in Parliament on Coalgate should break the momentum the BJP built up to corner the government. On the other hand, a discussion  could have acted as a springboard to take the issue to the people. This makes many wonder whether the BJP is really interested in a discussion on the subject, or only in encashing it politically. As for the Congress, it would only be happy not to be put on the mat.

Parties may gain politically in the short run by using  disruption as the language of parliamentary protest. But in the long run, it makes neither for the health of our democratic institutions, nor does it enhance the badly depleted credibility of our politicians and this should worry the entire political class.

The writer is a political and social commentator