A week of holidays, beginning with Ram Navmi and ending with Good Friday, has begun and it would appear as if our honourable parliamentarians too are taking a long break from their constitutional obligations. There have been no meaningful debates in Parliament. Instead, the acutely wearying subject of that hapless creature, the cow, has once again surfaced to agitate the summer-sodden brains of a somnolent legislature. While a resolution moved by a private member on a nationwide ban on cow slaughter galvanised the political class into frenzied debate, another on the Uniform Civil Code was withdrawn also after much fulmination. No doubt the cow slaughter resolution was passed to embarrass the Congress, in effect it ended up plunging Parliament into a pocket of inertia. The pre-occupation with issues of gau mata and religious laws is shocking, given the many serious matters that Parliament could fruitfully have discussed.Almost a year after the stock market scam, the Joint Parliamentary Committee probing the market collapse has at last delivered its report. Indian IT professionals are facing harassment abroad on an unprecedented scale. The public awaits to hear what the fallout of the end of the Iraq war will be on oil prices. But are our MPs bothered? Not at all. They have idled away three days on finding the correct word that best sums up their collective agony on Iraq. And now, with a range of bills awaiting discussion, MPs have taken most of next week off, so intent are they that not even national interest should come between them and their holidays. In any case, this is now the beginning of summer when the minds of most netas are no doubt focused on the prospects of fleeing to cooler climes. The clamour to board Vijay Mallya’s aeroplane to South Africa may be over, but summer is always the best time for tours to propagate Hindi in scenic international locales, where the shopping is excellent and the natives restless to receive Devnagri.So why bother with the boring business of law-making when summer approaches? In stark contrast to the speed with which MPs have, in past sessions, passed laws that hiked their salaries or voiced their opposition to increasing the number of working days, Parliament’s record of business over this session has so far been abysmal.
