It is hard to say whether it was the proverbial calm before the storm that was witnessed with great satisfaction in the Lok Sabha on the first day of the winter session. While we keep our fingers firmly crossed, hoping that order and reason will continue, we cannot but commend the parliamentarians for behaving themselves on Thursday. Maybe it was the solemnity of the occasion that made them behave like honourable members. The fear of being dubbed anti-Dalit while paying tribute to B R Ambedkar, the chairman of the Constituent Assembly whose 125th birth anniversary is being celebrated this year, could have been a factor. It was on this day 66 years ago that the final draft of the Constitution was adopted. Given the significance, members did well to hold back the partisan fire. As many feared, ‘normalcy’ can still return to Parliament from Monday on. Not that the speeches heard on Thursday lacked pointed barbs at the political rivals. But these were not direct provocations. Home Minister Rajnath Singh, for instance, initiating the debate, spoke about the belated insertion of a term in the Preamble which was alien to the founding fathers. He noted that till recently secularism was not bandied about loosely with the sole objective of dividing the polity on wholly imaginary secular/ communal lines. Being a Hindu majority nation, India had all along been secular. India being secular was a given. But Indira Gandhi, suffering from a guilty conscience after she railroading the Constitution in the Emergency, had arbitrarily injected the words, ‘secular’ and ‘socialist’ into the Preamble of the Constitution. The 42nd Amendment was a frontal assault on the framers of the Constitution. However, Singh said that that the government had no intention of tinkering with the Preamble. “Let bygones be bygones.” Ambedkar never thought to insert ‘secular’ in the Preamble because the ethos of India was rooted in the ancient belief of panth nirpekshata (neutrality among various religions). India drew its inspiration from Lord Rama, who being a true democrat had put Sita through agnipriksha on the say-so of one of his subjects, the Home Minister said. Touching upon Ambedkar’s mission to improve the lives of the untouchables, Singh declared that reservations were a socio-political necessity. There was no question of tinkering with reservations. In the backdrop of the recent controversy touched off by RSS Chief Mohan Bhagwat’s remarks about fine-tuning the reservation system, Singh’s assertion should help end the needless confusion. Tangentially referring to the on-going debate over intolerance, he said the abuse of the word ‘secular’ had fuelled an unnecessary row. He sought to enforce the message further by pointing out that India was the only country where all 72 sects of Muslims lived peacefully and where followers of all other religions enjoyed full freedom.
Speaking immediately after the Home Minister, Sonia Gandhi had her pre-scripted address ready. And read it out without a reference to what the previous speaker had said. That is the problem when you read parrot-like from a sheaf of papers. Expectedly, she claimed ownership of the Constitution, saying that those celebrating it today had no role in its making, a remark which led the Speaker Sumitra Mahajan to murmur audibly enough for the microphones to pick up that ‘they were not born then to participate in the process.’ But in a concession to the solemn occasion, Sonia’s penned down jibes were allowed to go uncommented by the treasury benches. Remarkably, there was a calculated effort to revive the memory of Rajendra Prasad, the two-term president of the Republic, though in his lifetime he was reviled by Nehruvian Congressmen for standing up for ‘Indian-Hindu’ values and ethos. Maybe the fact that the party was now a minor partner in the Bihar Government has led it to dust off the memory of Dr Prasad and pay him tribute. The Congress President quoted Ambedkar to say that howsoever good the Constitution, what eventually mattered was whether the people were implementing it. She noted how under the guidance of Gandhi, stalwart leaders like Nehru, Patel, Azad, Prasad and Ambedkar had formulated the founding document. She pointedly noted that Nehru had piloted the resolution at the 1931 Lahore session of the united freedom movement called the Congress Party for enshrining the economic and fundamental rights of the people. Hailing the greatness of the Constitution, she said that it was so flexible that it had been amended a hundred times to meet the needs of changing times. If Thursday’s proceedings are any indication, the two-day debate on the Constitution and its chief maker, Ambedkar, ought to end on a quiet note. It was encouraging that Prime Minister Modi spent better part of the morning session in the House. He should devote more time to Parliament and try and accommodate the Opposition as far as possible. The Opposition, on its part, having recovered some of its confidence after Bihar, has less reason to be irresponsible and uncooperative.
