stable Dear Express – Dear Express reader At the end of the last week in Parliament, if you have stakes in power being held accountable in the House, what would be your key takeaway? The government got its way, the Opposition couldn’t have its say, again, unfortunately. Advertisement The President addressed both Houses, outlining the government’s broad policy agenda and priorities.
The Finance Minister presented the Budget, but in the discussion on the motion of thanks on the President’s address in Lok Sabha, the Opposition could barely get a word in. Amid a showdown over the Leader of Opposition reading out excerpts relating to the Prime Minister’s decision-making in an hour of crisis, from an unpublished book by former army chief General MM Naravane, came the suspension of eight Opposition MPs. The PM could not speak in Lok Sabha either, but in Rajya Sabha he delivered a 97-minute speech.
Narendra Modi’s speech followed a template he has made his own: He spoke of the country Before Modi and After Modi; for all the BJP’s exertions to link India’s future to its past, for the PM, the India story is essentially discontinuous, the moment of rupture is 2014. He spoke in apocalyptic and messianic terms of Fall and Rise — of Naya Bharat being built on the old country’s erasure and debris.
This New India, helmed by him, is in ceaseless forward motion, through events, milestones and schemes. The picture of this self-confident country on-the-move was set in a world that is opening its doors to it, responding to its irresistible rise — at this point, he brought in the India-EU and India-US trade deals.
Advertisement Listening to the PM, it was also evident that anti-Congressism remains his visceral and abiding theme. Even with Congress’s electoral fortunes plunging, the Modi-BJP sees Congress as its primary opponent, not any other party. In the PM’s speeches is an acknowledgement that the BJP otherwise withholds of its adversary — that even in its unchecked waning, Congress is its only rival for the big-ideas, nation-wide plank in the polity, because the regional party is limited by a narrower viewfinder and smaller reach.
And then, PM Modi turned the spotlight on himself fully. Picking up a rude slogan last heard on the JNU campus as his refrain, he spoke of himself in the third person, underlining his portrayal of himself as the main character, rendering everyone and everything else as mere props in the India story.
But if the PM’s speech had all the familiar elements, and if Parliament also followed a style that has firmed up in the NDA years, in which the government and the Speaker together seek to close down all the Opposition’s spaces, the Congress-led Opposition needs to ask itself this: What did it do, did it do anything at all, to break a syndrome that hurts it more, denies it the right to speak and breathe? The answer is that LoP Rahul Gandhi was not trying to strategise his way out of the constraints imposed by the government — because he was repeating a reflexive pattern of his own making. Only, his pattern makes the BJP’s task a lot easier.
On this occasion, it drove the entire Opposition out of Lok Sabha without participating. It resulted in other Opposition MPs, especially those from poll-bound states like Assam and West Bengal, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, not getting a chance to speak.
Most of all, Rahul Gandhi mimics and underlines PM Modi’s portrayal of himself as the main character, rendering everything and everyone else as mere props in the India story. That strategy is pessimistic and self-limiting. With the PM deftly hijacking it to feed his own cult, it has also been backfiring.
More and more, it points to the Rahul-Congress’s lack of political and imaginative wherewithal to explore, and juggle, different ways of opposing. Rahul Gandhi must ask if the point he sought to make in Parliament, by citing the Naravane memoirs, was worth it.
In fact, he needs to think harder about it — saying that, when it came to the crunch with China, Modi was not the hyper muscular decision-maker, punctures Modi’s boast, but also raises a question: Is Congress saying that a hyper muscular decision-maker is what Congress wants Modi to be? In Rajya Sabha last week, though he is not a speaker who is riveting or compelling, Mallikarjun Kharge showed that it could have been done differently. Unlike Rahul Gandhi, Kharge’s focus was the Modi-led government, not just Modi. Unlike Rahul, he held his ground in the House, touched on a wide range of issues — questioning the government’s record on social justice and communal amity, its onslaught on Parliament processes and undermining of safety nets for workers and farmers, including in the India-US deal.
Till next time, Vandita Recommended Readings: Naseeruddin Shah: ‘When a university speaks power to truth’ Chiki Sarkar: ‘Walking with Andre Beteille, sometimes sitting with him’ C Raja Mohan: ‘With tariff cloud lifting, India-US can shape balance of power in Asia and world’ Suhas Palshikar: ‘The House is being hollowed of meaning’ Rohit Lamba: ‘The economy remains in search of a plan’.