Opinion Fifth Column: A methodical attack
On behalf of those of us watching from the outside may I say that both parties ended up looking juvenile and silly.
If the Prime Minister has not yet discovered that there is method in the Congress party’s madness it is time he did.
So the first week of the Monsoon Session of Parliament was a washout. And, there is little hope of recuperation next week. Things reached such an absurd impasse that ruling party MPs responded to Congress placards and protests with their own placards and protests under Gandhiji’s statue when the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha were adjourned for the nth time. And, for every scam charge that Congress MPs hurled at the treasury benches, the response was to hurl scams back. If you can charge our chief ministers in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh with corruption then what about your chief ministers in Uttarakhand and Himachal? If anybody in the Modi government thought this was a good strategy they were wrong.
On behalf of those of us watching from the outside may I say that both parties ended up looking juvenile and silly. It seemed as if all our elected representatives forgot that they were elected to represent us inside Parliament not under Gandhiji’s statue. When Congress leaders have been reminded of their paramount duty to the electorate the response has predictably been that this is a legitimate game of tit for tat since the BJP stalled many sessions of Parliament when it was in opposition.
When Shashi Tharoor suggested in a party meeting that it would be wiser to use debate instead of disruption as a weapon he was reportedly reprimanded by his supreme leader. Congress spokesmen denounced him in TV debates so resoundingly that he had to deny that he was about to join the BJP.
What puzzles me is why MPs who shriek about their ‘constitutional right’ to use disruption as a tactic are not reminded more firmly that the Constitution also imposes on them the duty to not defile the hallowed halls of Parliament with slogans more appropriate to bazaar brawls. There are rules that permit the leaders of the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha to expel badly behaved MPs but for mysterious reasons they are rarely used.
If the Prime Minister has not yet discovered that there is method in the Congress party’s madness it is time he did. The Congress is a private limited company run by Sonia and Rahul Gandhi, and if Rahul is to take over from Mummy it has to happen in 2019 or it could be too late. The only way this succession plan will succeed is if Narendra Modi fails to bring about the ‘parivartan’ that Indians gave him a full mandate for. So every effort will continue to be made to ensure that the government remains distracted from real work by something or other. Before Lalitgate and Vyapam please remember that there was the land Bill, and from Rahul Gandhi’s travels in Andhra Pradesh it has become clear that he is back to telling farmers that the Modi government’s ‘suit-boot ki sarkar’ is trying to steal their land from them.
If this issue fails to spread anger and despair in the country then there is no doubt at all that another will be found. This is because the Congress can quite simply not afford to allow the Modi government to succeed. So every single thing that the government does that is good for the country will be mocked or reviled. Rahul Gandhi has personally led the charge against ‘Make in India’ by repeating ad nauseum and misleadingly that farmers and workers are already making in India so why should there be any more said on this subject?
In similar vein he has mocked the Prime Minister’s efforts to evolve a more robust foreign policy than Mummy had by taunting him for never being in India. In his new role as the patron saint of farmers he has sneered at the Prime Minister for traveling all over the world but not making a single journey to study the plight of farmers. He became an instant expert on the subject after his own day trip to a grain market in Punjab. Notice that the attack is directed always at Modi personally.
And, if the Prime Minister has not managed so far to effectively stymie the ‘shahzaada’ it is because he seems not to have a clear strategy in mind. There is room left in this column for only one small but crucial example. If in those euphoric first months after he took office Modi had used his enormous oratorical skills to explain to ordinary Indians just how bad the state of the economy was they would have allowed him to take whatever harsh measures he needed to take, swallowed whatever bitter medicine. Instead of this Modi’s ministers began to talk of ‘continuity’ in government policies as if this were some sort of virtue. Why did the Prime Minister not remind them that if India’s voters had wanted ‘continuity’ they would have given Rahul Gandhi the prime minister’s job?
@ tavleen_singh
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