House, arrested

A constitutional crisis has been averted, they say. Government and Opposition have agreed to complete the bare formalities of passing the Union Budget. The Railway Budget is passed, ditto for the demands for grants for ministries and the Appropriation Bill. The Finance Bill will also be through if all goes well. Business canned, Parliament will be adjourned sine die and parliamentarians can return to the street. There, according to George Fernandes, is where they must rightly be. It is where the politics is. The NDA convenor was frankly dismissive about Parliament to newspersons on Tuesday. Those who still insist on the eminence of Parliament as the forum of debate and for enforcing legislative scrutiny and governmental accountability, must explain themselves.

But are there any people out there who will miss Parliament, if it adjourns a week early? Does anyone even notice any more when Parliament shuts down, doesn’t do its job? Perhaps Fernandes is on to something, after all. It may be that the veteran of so many political circumstances has sensed the predicament of the parliamentary institution. All the really big political controversies in recent years — from Ayodhya to Tehelka to the tainted ministers row — have played themselves out outside its gates. They figured inside Parliament only as cursory cues for overwhelming furore, walkouts, adjournments. When was the last time there was a debate in the House that resonated outside its portals? When, indeed, the last truly stirring speech, that moment of eloquence or erudition in which a pressing national problem seemed suddenly more permeable? Parliamentarians are quick to blame the media for trivialising the hard work of Parliament by focusing only on the spectaculars. There may be some truth in that. But as the fate of this Budget session shows, the crisis of Parliament does not lie primarily in the eyes of the beholder in the press gallery.

The crisis of the 14th Lok Sabha is made of an Opposition that is not reconciled to being one. The BJP-led NDA has conducted itself with the most embarrassing churlishness ever since the Congress-led UPA government assumed power. The party does not have a strategy save to hold up Parliament. The tainted ministers issue, Uma Bharti’s resignation, controversy over Savarkar — they have all been rendered into displays of pique. The crisis of this Lok Sabha is also of the Congress-led UPA’s inability to find the will or the sagacity to engage and persuade the Opposition. The apportioning of blame may be contentious. But the victim is certainly the tax-paying citizen. And that set of intangibles that we call political culture.