Opposition hits back with vote count
“Kissi ke waaste raahein kahan badalti hain; tum apne aap ko khud hi badal sako to chalo” (Paths don’t change their course for anybody; if you can change yourself, please do”) – Modi reciting poet Nida Fazli’s famous ghazal “Safar main dhoop to hogi…
New Delhi: On the face of it, there is a change in the texture of the parliamentary proceedings in this budget session. Gone are the chaotic disruptions, and the debates are finally taking place. But the acutely partisan divide on both sides of the aisle remains as entrenched as ever.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi displayed his characteristic ‘mock and preach’ style to good effect and the opposition hit back demanding a vote count on an amendment to the motion of thanks to the president’s address. In sum, nothing has changed.
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For more than an hour, Modi used the same tactic that he had used in the Lok Sabha to have a go at the opposition, throwing quotes from Pandit Nehru and Indira Gandhi at them, and listing the failures of the previous administrations that are ‘‘now being strenuously cleaned up by his government.” Recalling that Nehru had described the Rajya Sabha as a chamber of ideas, he said amid thumping of Desks: “I hope we give importance to Pandit Nehru’s thinking and I hope all pending bills are passed in this session.” Modi quoted indira Gandhi when he said: “There are two kinds of people — the ones who work, and the ones who just take the credit for it. Indira Gandhi had asked people to strive to become the first kind, because competition to be like the first kind was a lot less.” The reference was quite obviously to the Congress.
Pointing out that unlike the former prime minister Manmohan Singh he is not an economist, but as a young man growing up in a rural setting he knows something about farming, Modi said that there is nothing impossible about the government’s claim that the farmers income shall be doubled by 2022. He detailed a host of steps being planned by the government in that direction and called upon all political parties to join in this resolve. He also quoted the noted agri-expert M S Swaminathan to justify this optimism.
Congress amendment
However, Modi’s appeal to the opposition to drop all the 300 amendments to the motion of thanks did not find any takers in the opposition, indicating that it was business as usual.
Leader of Opposition Ghulam Nabi Azad who moved the amendment regretted that the address did not commit support to rights of all citizens to contest Panchayat
elections in the backdrop of law in Rajasthan and Haryana where matriculation has been fixed as the criteria for contesting the polls. The amendment was later accepted with 94-61 vote.
Speaking to reporters later, Azad said that the government’s refusal to support the rights of all citizens is an attack on democracy and cannot go unchallenged.
“This is not an acceptable practice in a democracy — that you do not have any academic qualification to be a prime minister or minister, but you impose such restrictions at the panchayat level,” he said.
