by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group
Prime Minister Narendra Modi was not literally correct when he told the TIME magazine in a recent interview that the Indian Constitution is his “only holy book”. The trouble with holy books is that once written they cannot be changed, and, if changed, a new religion is born. But Constitutions are liable to change. Modi is now struggling to amend the Constitution for legislating Goods and Services Tax (GST). It will not only make taxes by and large uniform across the states and UTs but should give the first stamp of confirmation on US President Barack Obama’s description of Modi, in TIME’s earlier issue listing the world’s most powerful men, as India’s “reformer-in-chief”.
The Congress, Modi’s chief rival, says it is not against the GST but still wouldn’t let it pass through Rajya Sabha where Modi’s BJP does not have the majority. The drama over GST hadn’t unfolded till Sunday, when this article was being written. But, from every indication, it looked doomed to get mired in a Select Committee, as the Congress demanded, or witness a showdown with an uncertain climax. The Congress is equally cussed on the amended land acquisition bill (elaborately discussed in this space last week), but if it gets stuck this can be for other reasons as, in its present form, it has too many antagonists.
The Congress’ new obstructive resistance is clearly a follow-up on its vice president Rahul Gandhi returning from 56 days of what his party calls a “sabbatical”, and taking his seat in the saddle next only to his mother and party president Sonia Gandhi. Despite Rahul’s high-voltage campaign after his unexplained holiday, the party is nowhere near revival in the two major states, Bihar and West Bengal, where assembly elections are due in a year from now. Nor is there much internal cohesion left in the party. Many of its senior leaders have moved to the wings, alarmed at the meteoric rise of Rahul after the sabbatical. Yet the party has been stirred into action that catches the headlines, not to speak of bringing the House to a standstill. Rahul is evidently the main source of encouragement to the Congress’ obstreperous tactics. Last week, he made a flimsy remark about Prime Minister Modi being “vengeful” on the issue of Amethi food park issue. Anything can spark a high decibel slanging match now, and put a question mark on the fate of new laws initiated by the hapless reformer-in-chief.
It seems that the Congress party under Rahul’s de facto command has a long-term plan. It is to prevent Modi from bringing about any substantive change in the way the government functions. Modi has seen through the Congress trick. Sensing trouble ahead in the Rajya Sabha, Modi would rather let the bills wait until he is able to manage a workable majority in the Rajya Sabha than surrender to his adversaries, specially to Rahul, who was “prancing around” (khel kud), as he is reported to have put it privately. He has started wooing regional parties who dictate balance of power in the Rajya Sabha and may try to isolate the Congress & the Left.
For Rahul, it is payback time to
the BJP which obstructed UPA-II
However, Modi will be too embarrassed to admit that his BJP, previously under the leadership of the octogenarian L. K. Advani, had pioneered the same obstruction tactics during UPA’s ten years rule after he shock defeat in 2004 Lok Sabha elections. Think tank Social Watch India, in a 2013 report (Ajay K. Mehra, “the Indian Parliament and ‘Cost to the Country’”), noted that in 2010-12, the Lok Sabha, in nine of its sessions, sat for 852 hours but was disrupted as many as 577 hours. Advani did not allow Manmohan Singh to introduce to the House his Council of Ministers to the House saying most of them were corrupt.
The UPA-ll ended up as a parliamentary pandemonium because the BJP under Advani, wild after its failure to regain power in 2009, turned every issue into a face off with the government. In the words in 2013 of Hamid Ansari, Vice President of India and Chairman of the Rajya Sabha, “every single rule in the rule book, every single etiquette is being violated...If the Honourable members wish the House to become a federation of anarchists, then it is a different matter.” It was clear that Advani, after being projected as BJP’s PM candidate in 2009 despite his age, could not swallow his party’s electoral defeat and got so intensely riled that he misused his unquestioned authority in the party to turn it into an engine to obstruct the government in the institution that makes and changes laws. It left the government paralysed particularly after the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi which was preceded by a series of Central and state elections. That caused lowering of oversight, and corruption. The CAG noticed many irregularities, and, as these found outlet through a growingly hawk-eyed media, BJP under Advani decided its hour of revenge had come. After that, Parliament was never the same again. For Rahul, it is payback time.
If the cycle of personal revenge and political vendetta continues, it will scupper Modi’s dream of making India a country for the world to respect for its potential. But above all it will raise unsavoury questions about India’s choice of representative government after Independence, for, as B. R. Ambedkar noted, “democracy in India is only a top-dressing on an Indian soil, which is essentially undemocratic”. It also gives a prophetic ring to the same speech of Ambedkar in which he urged the nation to shed its legacy of the “bloody methods of revolution” including civil disobedience and satyagraha. He called this the “grammar of anarchy”. If he had lived some more decades, he could add to this list the MPs’ regular exercise of rushing to the well of the House to force an adjournment.
(The author is National Editor, Lokmat group)
