Opinion A new Parliament, a moment missed
Unfortunately, the government and the Opposition failed to heed the call of history. The Parliament inauguration turned out to be a frame of our polarised time.
A stone's throw away from Parliament at Jantar Mantar, Delhi Police was busy arresting the nation's celebrated wrestlers, among them Sakshi Malik and Vinesh Phogat, who have been demanding the arrest of BJP MP Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, facing charges of sexual assault, including under POCSO. (Express Photo/PTI) India got a new Parliament building on Sunday. A series of Hindu rituals, including a havan, preceded the inauguration. After the havan, the Prime Minister received the Sengol, first given to then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in 1947 just after Independence, from the representatives of Thiruvaduthurai Adheenam, a Shaivite matha near Mayiladuthurai, Tamil Nadu. Accompanied by the representatives of various Adheenams in Tamil Nadu and the Speaker of the Lok Sabha, the PM installed the Sengol, the sceptre, in the new building. Missing at this event were the President of India, the Vice-President, and the bulk of the Opposition. The Opposition had wanted the President, the Head of the State, to inaugurate the new Parliament. The government preferred the PM. The divisive politics, made stark by the absence of the Opposition, left a bitter taste. The BJP had done well to have Droupadi Murmu, an Adivasi woman, elected as the President of India. How remarkable the symbolism would have been if a woman, an Adivasi woman, inaugurated the new House? Did the BJP, which rarely lets go an opportunity to score a political point, miss a stab at history? Later, a message from the President was read out. An all-faith prayer was held after the Sengol was installed.
The Express editorial (‘Minus Opposition’, May 24) on the fraught nature of the inauguration had said, “Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s decision to place himself at the centre of the ceremony makes this moment more political and less encompassing than it could have been — the President would surely have been a better choice.” It also said, “But it is necessary in this special moment when a nation gets a more modern and more capacious Parliament, that all parties stand on tiptoe and look to the future that will occupy the new House and that it will belong to. It cannot be — it should not be — that when coming generations look at this diverse nation’s photo album, they see a Parliament that is bare and monochromatic because 19 parties could not rise above their grievance, legitimate though it may have been, to embrace the larger occasion.” The editorial went on to say: “If the Opposition is choosing the wrong moment to withdraw, the Modi government has issued only a half-hearted invitation to it. Both sides need to find a way out of the separate corners they have backed themselves into. They must do so because history will not forgive them if they won’t. They must do so, for the sake of the people, and for the people’s Parliament.”
Unfortunately, the government and the Opposition failed to heed the call of history. The Parliament inauguration turned out to be a frame of our polarised time. Meanwhile, a stone’s throw away from Parliament at Jantar Mantar, Delhi Police was busy arresting the nation’s celebrated wrestlers, among them Sakshi Malik and Vinesh Phogat, who have been demanding the arrest of BJP MP Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, facing charges of sexual assault, including under POCSO.
CPM politburo member Brinda Karat explained in her Op-Ed (‘A democratic protest’, May 27) why the Opposition sticks with its decision to boycott the function. She recalled the words of Hansa Mehta, freedom fighter and one of the 15 women members of the Constituent Assembly, as she handed over the national flag was handed over to the president of the Assembly, Rajendra Prasad at the historic midnight session of the Constituent Assembly in 1947. Karat quotes Mehta: “It is in the fitness of things that this first flag that will fly over this august House should be a gift from the women of India…”. Karat points out that it was not Prime Minister Nehru who received the flag, but Rajendra Prasad, the President of the Constituent Assembly. She writes: “There would have been no reason for Nehru, the acknowledged leader of the Assembly, not to have received the flag, since there were no set rules. Propriety and norms of respect for the president of the Assembly would have determined who received the flag.”
Karat puts the omission of President Murmu at the inauguration is a larger context of “unprecedented centralisation of power in the hands of the central government, and within that government in the hands of the prime minister”. She says, “A parliamentary majority is being used as a bulldozer to fashion an autocracy, the new India version of a presidential form of governance.”
On the Sengol, which sparked a war of words between the BJP and the Congress, C R Kesavan, now a BJP spokesperson, wrote (‘Sceptre in the House’, May 27): “It is indeed fitting that our Prime Minister will be installing this sacred sceptre in its rightful place behind the Speaker’s chair in the Lok Sabha. From this position, in the temple of our democracy, this sengol will eternally symbolise the rule of dharma, the civilisational core by which our great nation is governed.” In his Op-Ed on the Sengol (‘Decoding Sengol, the sacred sceptre’), RSS leader and President, India Foundation, Ram Madhav, wrote: “As Sengol reaches the new Parliament house its real significance as the Dharma Dand — the Indian civilisational tradition of ethical-spiritual authority over mere political authority — must be the point of debate rather than the nitpicking over its historicity.”
For a deeper understanding of the event and the continuing political joust, visit indianexpress.com. We have excerpted the Prime Minister’s speech at the inaugural and articles by the Leader of the Congress in the Lok Sabha, Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, and Rajya Sabha MP from the BJP Rakesh Sinha. We also have a translation of an article the founder of DMK, C N Annadurai wrote on the Sengol, after it was offered to PM Nehru, in the August 24, 1947 issue of ‘Dravida Nadu’.
That’s all for this week.
Thank you,
Amrith
Amrith Lal is Deputy Editor with the Opinion team
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