by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group
It is taken for granted that the monsoon session of Parliament, commencing today, will be consistent with the season; in other words, it is waiting to be washed out. The bone of contention is as predictable as the players. It is BJP V. Congress, or, more precisely, Prime Minister Narendra Modi V. Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi. The theme of the battle is also old. It is Modi's struggle to remove from the UPA's law in 2013 an obstructionist clause that requires consent of 70 per cent of landowners, including tenant farmers, before the government can use the land to make roads, flyovers, new railways tracks, etc. The NDA says it is largely due to this law that infrastructure growth in India came to a standstill since last year, and private industrial investment suffered even more as that requires an even larger extent of consent, 80 per cent. The bill is stuck in the Rajya Sabha for obvious reasons. Modi tried to get the better of his rivals last December by pushing a series of executive orders, or ordinances, removing the consent clause. But ordinance is no alternative to law.
