Amidst war of words in Houses
New Delhi : Amid an uneasy ambience in the Lok Sabha while the majority of the opposition MPs boycott the House, the government gets its business transacted without any difficulty. “Now you cannot say that the monsoon session is a wash out,” quips a senior cabinet minister during the course of an informal interaction with the media.
However, if the floor managers of Narendra Modi government assumed that the suspension would isolate the Congress MPs and they would be able to transact the business sans the major opposition party then their hopes have been dashed. The Congress party dharna at Parliament before the start of the day’s proceedings was joined by the other parties in opposition too and though the Lok Sabha conducted its business with a truncated opposition, the Rajya Sabha which is a Congress bastion remained paralysed.
The Congress believes that it is back into the perception game as it is ”exposing the insensitivity” of the Modi sarkar towards the issue of corruption and probity in public life, and the BJP is smug that the opposition is also getting labeled as ”anti-development” in the process. So, is it a win-win game for both sides?
It is here that the lip service to parliamentary democracy comes in.” The government is nothing without the opposition, and so is the parliament,” says Congress spokesperson Randeep Surjewala. On the other end, union parliamentary affairs minister Venkaiah Naidu also says that they want the participation of the opposition in the proceedings.
“But this proves our point that the speaker’s action is pr-meditated,” he added. The BJP does have a defence and cites a precedent from the 1970s when the fiery socialist member Madhu Limaye too was suspended even in his absence from the house.
The current stalemate with the ruling party and the opposition would surely take its toll of the GST and the Land Acquisition bill in this session of the parliament. The hardening of the stance after the suspension has further closed the narrow margins of compromise on these two key issues.
