Listening in

When an all-party parliamentary delegation arrived in Srinagar on Monday,they must have found the quiet of the security cordons forbidding. They were in Jammu and Kashmir to meet a cross-section of people and,as per the statement issued after the prime ministers all-party meet last week,gather all shades of opinion,so that they could return to Delhi and provide inputs to the government in moving forward in addressing the spiral of protests that have seized the Valley. Thats not an easy task in towns whose residents have been caught out of the rhythms of ordinary life by protests,confrontation between stone-pelters and the police,and curfews. In addition,some shades of opinion had appeared to be beyond reach,with separatists threatening to stay away. Yet,the fact that MPs improvised their schedule,and took the initiative to call on those political leaders instead,and visited the injured in hospital,is a valuable reminder of the maturity of our politics to absorb diversity and divergence of opinion.

Instead of being detained by protocol,for instance,some groups of MPs went and called on Syed Ali Shah Geelani,Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and Yasin Malik. Around the formal table,these meetings may not be possible,but the courtesies that were exchanged at these impromptu visits are revealing.

Politics gets some pretty terrible press on most days,but it is what keeps our democracy supple and resilient. It pervades spaces other,more formal,instruments of government cannot. The talks the MPs held across the state may not directly yield a solution; thats a mandate they neither had nor would presumably seek. They also did not go as a homogenous group. In fact,in the raucousness of the political shades they themselves represent,and drawing on their strength as elected representatives,they dispensed a collective duty to watch,to listen,to pay attention,to offer a healing touch and to say that they are seized of the distress and disquiet in the state. It is the raucousness of Indian politics that allows our democracy to absorb different points of view as well as devastating critiques of its writ. Hearing them out is not to adopt them or to rewrite the terms of sovereignty it is to keep the idea of Indian nationhood

capacious and updated.

The treasury benches are not always fleet-footed enough to call on their opposite numbers in Parliament to get on the same page on issues,not to diminish political difference but to draw on the Houses and by extension the countrys collective robustness. Heres a reminder why they should.