Things fall apart...

...Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world: WB Yeats in The Second Coming

Image courtesy Live Law

THE problem with forging a weapon is that there is no guarantee it will not be turned against you, as the BJP is now finding out to its cost.

“Each morning the [BJP] core parliamentary committee meets and takes a decision whether to allow Parliament to function that day”

Those are words spoken in November 2021 2011 by the late Sushma Swaraj, who was Leader of the Opposition in the 15th Lok Sabha. The BJP, as the largest Opposition party, then had 112 MPs in the House, 13 more than the Congress has today.

Parliament, then, was in a state of permanent gridlock, enforced by the BJP whose MPs regularly created a ruckus, stormed the well of the House at every opportunity, and ensured that little or no government business was transacted. (To add a coating of irony, in the 2014 general elections “government paralysis” was one of the main charges levelled by the BJP against the incumbent UPA led by Dr Manmohan Singh.)

Almost a year later and with gridlock by then institutionalised, Swaraj’s colleague and Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha the late Arun Jaitley responded to charges of obstruction with this rationale:

“Parliament’s job is to conduct discussions. But many a time, Parliament is used to ignore issues and in such situations, obstruction of Parliament is in the favour of democracy. Therefore, parliamentary obstruction is not undemocratic.”

That was merely one of several such justifications — this Indian Express piece from July 2022 rounds up several more quotes from Jaitley over time, including: “There are occasions when obstruction in Parliament brings greater benefits to the country”.

The just concluded opening session of the 18th Lok Sabha underlined the danger of such opportunistic strategies — the shoe is now firmly on the other foot, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi found out when the now-beefed up and emboldened Opposition kept up constant sloganeering during his speech in the Lok Sabha, and walked out mid-speech in the Rajya Sabha a day later.

The only difference was that then, the BJP did not want a debate — Jaitley himself had said so, as far back as 2012 (See the story linked above) whereas now, the Opposition uproar was in support of the demand for a debate on the pressing issues of the day, including but not restricted to Manipur and to the NEET exam paper leaks.

Note that Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi had, on 2 July, written to the Prime Minister asking him to facilitate, and to lead, a debate on NEET. “Our students deserve answers,” Gandhi wrote, adding that a “parliamentary debate is the first step towards rebuilding and restoring their faith”.

That same evening, Speaker Om Birla adjourned the house sine die, a day ahead of the scheduled 3 July closure announced by Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kiren Rijiju.

As for the PM’s speech that closed out a session characterised by fierce attacks from various Opposition leaders and obfuscatory responses from the treasury benches, the best interpretation that can be placed on his performance is that one of his aides, by mistake, handed him the text of a stump speech from the recent election campaign.

It was an overlong cocktail of tried and tired attacks on the Opposition in general and the Congress in particular, insulting personal references to Opposition leaders, revisionist history (as for instance his line that Nehru did not want Dr Ambedkar in Parliament and forced him to resign), the whole punctuated by periods of clowning and tortured pop culture references (how he managed to connect the mausi character from the curry Western Sholay to a third electoral defeat for the Congress, I am yet to figure out, and not for want of trying).

There were many face-palm moments, not the least of which came when Modi said that a day earlier, on 1 July, people eagerly checked their bank accounts to see whether the Rs 8,500 the Congress had promised to deposit khatakhat every month had landed — probably the first instance ever where the leader of a ruling party criticised an Opposition for not fulfilling its poll promise.

The full speech is here, in both video and text form, for those who have the stomach for it.

The commentariat has been dissecting not the speech, but the surround sound of Opposition protests that persisted throughout Modi’s oration. What is largely absent from those discussions is the proximate cause of the protests.

In 2019, the BJP had won Inner Manipur and its ally the Naga People’s Front had won Outer Manipur. In the recent elections, INC candidate Angomcha Bimol Akoijam won Inner Manipur with a margin of 1,09,801 votes over his BJP rival Thounaojam Singh. His INC colleague Alfred Kanngam Arthur won Outer Manipur by a margin of 85,418 votes.

In a not so subtle move to invisibilise an entire state and its tormented people, Akoijam was given a speaking slot at midnight (Watch his speech here). Arthur was not called on to speak at all, and the Opposition’s request that he be given at least two minutes before the PM’s response was turned down. (A video of the protest)

This sparked the protests, with the two Manipur MPs being joined by his colleagues from the north-east. (Modi got to speak for two hours and 15 minutes, btw).

Remember Jaitley’s words quoted above? “Parliament’s job is to conduct discussions. But many a time, Parliament is used to ignore issues and in such situations, obstruction of Parliament is in the favour of democracy.”

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For want of a statesman…

Today marks day #430 since ethnic conflict broke out in Manipur, and rapidly descended into civil war with the government openly siding with one of the combatants. (Apropos, on the same day that PM Modi assured the Rajya Sabha that all was well with Manipur, the Supreme Court had harsh words for the state government. “We do not trust the state. We do not.”, the SC was moved to comment.)

Every session of Parliament since 3 May 2023 when the conflict first erupted has been marked by Opposition demands for a debate on Manipur on the floor of the House and, more importantly, for an official statement by the Prime Minister. Equally, these sessions have been marked by systematic stalling by the government.

A little over a year ago on 25 July 2023, in course of the monsoon session of the 17th Lok Sabha, Home Minister Amit Shah responded to a reiteration of that demand by saying that the government was ready for a debate, while carefully skirting the demand for the PM to make a statement.

"I am willing for discussion in Lok Sabha on the situation in Manipur but do not know why the opposition does not want it," Shah said then, twisting the truth more than somewhat — it is not that the Opposition did not want a debate, merely that they wanted the PM to be part of it.

On that occasion, Shah said that the Opposition that did not want a debate because it did not want the truth on Manipur to come out.

That was on par with what the government had been doing outside the House — shifting the onus and insinuating that the situation in Manipur owed to some dark deeds of the Opposition. The question that is not asked is, what is that “truth” and what stopped the Home Minister from revealing that “truth”, either in the House or outside?

The tragedy of Manipur is that it has become a political football to be kicked around in Parliament (two earlier pieces I had done are here, from 30 July 2023 and 23 January 2024; the 30 July story also looks at how the BJP had, in its campaign for the Manipur Assembly elections, sowed the seeds of the present crisis).

I was at dinner recently with, among others, a retired IPS officer with extensive experience in the north-east in general and Manipur in particular. At one point I asked him what, given his expertise, he thought the steps to a solution would be.

Without condoning the violence, he pointed out that the Meiteis have reason to be upset at the growing spread of the Kuki community across the plains; equally, the Kukis have a point when the community says that it gets backhanded treatment from the government.

Negotiation is the only way to solve this, he said, and it is not going to be easy. You need to work with both sides; most importantly, you have to find a way to give the Kukis the feeling that they are not being excluded — maybe through funding and rehabilitation and, in the long term, by finding ways and means to give them a greater voice in governance, a seat at the top table.

He had a lot of good ideas. While listening, two thoughts occurred: (1) There are many like him with practical experience and hard-won expertise in the region. A sensible government would rope such people in and make their inputs key to the search for a solution and (2) The solutions he was suggesting would take painstaking negotiations and considerable statesmanship to pull off — and who in this 56” government is capable of such prolonged effort?

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This is an emergency

In July 2023, the government, citing NCRB data, informed Parliament that 13.3 lakh girls had gone “missing” across the country between 2019-2021.

At the time, the government listed a series of measures (see story linked above) the Ministry of Home Affairs said it had taken to ensure the safety of women.

On 3 July the Madhya Pradesh Assembly was told that over 31,000 women had gone missing in a three year span from 2021-2024. “According to official data”, the story says. “An average of 28 women and three girls go missing every day in Madhya Pradesh,” the story says.

Per the earlier story, Parliament was told that in Madhya Pradesh, 1,60,180 women and 38,234 girls went missing between 2019 and 2021. Is this latest figure an “improvement”, or just another instance of governments making figures up as they go along? (For context, read this April 2024 deep dive from The Hindu)

It is a very brief story — just a 160-word regurgitation of official data, sans insight. And yet, what there is, is startling: for instance in Ujjain, 676 women have gone missing over the past 34 months, yet not a single case has been registered. In Indore, 479 women have been missing for over a month, but only 15 cases were registered.

Why is this not a national emergency? Why is this not an issue to be raised in Parliament, an issue that cues the media into asking hard questions of the government, given it concerns approximately 50% of the population? What happened to the slew of preventive measures the MHA assured Parliament that it had instituted?

And while on issues that matter, but are pushed to the margins thanks to our obsession with political theatrics, in Bihar 12 bridges have collapsed in the space of 17 days (Timeline). Some of these were under construction and some, just weeks or months old.

Each such collapse has been accompanied by the announcement of an inquiry. So now Bihar, which boasts a “double-engine government” and which in the recently concluded elections gave the BJP 12 seats and its NDA allies the JDU 12 and the Lok Janshakti Party 5 for a total of 29 of the 40 seats on offer, now has 12 inquiry committees where it had 12 bridges.

An unnamed official from the Bihar government says the engineers did not exercise proper care and the contractors were not diligent, either. No shit, Sherlock? How about the responsibility of the government to monitor public works and ensure they are up to standard?

A PIL has been filed in the Supreme Court seeking directions to the Bihar government for a full structural audit and for the constitution of a high-level expert committee to identify weak bridges that require to be either strengthened or demolished.

Earlier, when three airport roofs collapsed in the span of less than a week, the Minister for Civil Aviation ordered a structural audit of all airports.

Question is, why does this even need a ministerial order “order”, or intervention from the apex court? Such audits are — or are supposed to be — part of routine maintenance.

There is a bit more to governance than photo-ops — but then, you get what you vote for.

EOM, see you next week.