Opinion Vandita Mishra writes: Read their lips, government & Opposition repeat their lines in the House. Sameness hurts Opposition more
If the PM’s speech had all the familiar elements, if Parliament also followed a style firmed up in the NDA years, the Congress-led Opposition needs to ask itself: What did it do, did it do anything at all, to break a syndrome that hurts it more, denies it the right to speak and breathe?
Listening to the PM, it was also evident that anti-Congressism remains his visceral and abiding theme. Even with Congress’s electoral fortunes plunging, the Modi-BJP sees Congress as its primary opponent, not any other party. (PTI photos) If you have stakes in power being held accountable in the House, what would be your key takeaway from Parliament at the end of last week? The government got its way, the Opposition couldn’t have its say, again, unfortunately.
The President addressed both Houses, outlining the government’s broad policy agenda and the Finance Minister presented the Budget. But in the discussion on the motion of thanks on the President’s address in Lok Sabha, the Opposition barely got a word in. Amid a showdown over the Leader of Opposition reading out excerpts from a former army chief’s unpublished memoirs relating to the Prime Minister’s decision-making in an hour of crisis, the Speaker disallowed the LoP from speaking and suspended eight Opposition MPs. Meanwhile in Rajya Sabha, the PM delivered a 97-minute speech.
Narendra Modi followed a template he has patented: He spoke of the country Before and After Modi. For all the BJP’s hectic exertions to link India’s future to its past, the India story is discontinuous for the PM, and the moment of rupture is 2014.
He spoke in apocalyptic and messianic terms of Fall and Rise — of Naya Bharat being built on the old country’s debris. This New India, helmed by him, is in ceaseless forward motion, through events, milestones, schemes. He set the picture of the country on-the-move in a world opening its doors to it — here, he brought in the India-EU and India-US trade deals.
Listening to the PM, it was evident that anti-Congressism remains his visceral and abiding theme. Even with Congress’s electoral fortunes plunging, the Modi-BJP sees Congress as its primary opponent, not any other party. In the PM’s speeches lurks a back-handed acknowledgement of its adversary — that even in its unchecked waning, Congress is its only rival for the big-ideas, nation-wide plank in the polity, because the regional party is limited by a narrower viewfinder and smaller reach.
And then, PM Modi turned the spotlight on himself, fully. Picking up a rude slogan last heard on the JNU campus as his refrain, he underlined his portrayal of himself as the main character, rendering everyone and everything else as mere props, in the India story.
But if the PM’s speech had all the familiar elements, and if the government and the Speaker appeared to band together again in Parliament to close down the Opposition’s spaces, the Congress-led Opposition needs to ask itself this: What did it do, did it do anything at all, to break a syndrome that hurts it more, denies it the right to speak and breathe?
The answer is that LoP Rahul Gandhi was not trying to strategise his way out of the constraints — because he was much too busy repeating a reflexive pattern of his own making. Only, his pattern makes the BJP’s job easier. On this occasion, it drove the entire Opposition out of Lok Sabha without participating. It resulted in other Opposition MPs, especially those from poll-bound states like Assam and West Bengal, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, not getting a chance to speak.
Most of all, Rahul Gandhi mimics and underlines PM Modi’s portrayal of himself as the main character, rendering everything and everyone else as mere props, in the India story.
That is a pessimistic and self-limiting strategy. With the PM hijacking it to feed his own cult, it has also been backfiring. More and more, it points to the Rahul-Congress’s lack of political and imaginative wherewithal to explore, and juggle, different ways of opposing.
Rahul Gandhi must ask if the point he sought to make in Parliament, by citing the Naravane memoirs, was worth it. In fact, he needs to think harder about it — saying that, when it came to the crunch with China, Modi was not the hyper muscular decision-maker, punctures Modi’s boast, but it also raises a question: Is Congress saying that a hyper muscular decision-maker is what Congress wants Modi to be?
In Rajya Sabha last week, though he is no riveting speaker, Mallikarjun Kharge showed that it could have been done differently. Unlike Rahul, Kharge’s focus was the Modi-led government, not just Modi. Unlike Rahul, he touched on a wide range of issues — questioning the government’s record on social justice and communal amity, its onslaught on parliamentary processes and its undermining of safety nets for workers and farmers, including in the India-US deal.
The writer is national opinion editor, The Indian Express
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