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Journalism of Courage
An extended weekend is clearly not long enough to make our MPs yearn for the rigour of parliamentary debate. Instead, when they convened on Wednesday morning, they preferred to limit their duels to an obstinate standoff, punctuating the day with repeated adjournments and walkouts. The issue at hand has already produced much noise and little progress in recent weeks. The Opposition remains insistent that the government furnish details of the CVC8217;s report on defence purchases to the public accounts committee inquiring into Operation Vijay. Nothing doing, the government counters, the withheld portions have nothing to do with the 1999 Kargil war. For days on end, both sides have been repeating their positions with all the emphasis they can muster; but beyond that, they appear to be unwilling to explore a way out, to locate a meeting ground to depolarise proceedings and move on to other business before the two Houses.
Is the rest of the monsoon session of Parliament then destined to be washed away? To be sure, the session was always expected to be politically charged. With assembly elections round the corner and with the Congress and BJP upping the stakes by moving into campaign gear, only the compulsively optimistic could have expected anything resembling bipartisanship. Still, this session appears to be spiralling out of control. It is not the din that depresses. Besides legislating, parliamentarians have a duty to represent the concerns of their constituents in particular and the people of India in general as well as to scrutinise the affairs of the executive.
