Opinion Express View on the new Parliament building inauguration: Minus Opposition

The joint statement announcing the decision of 19 Opposition parties to boycott the new Parliament building’s inauguration begins with an acknowledgement of the significance of the occasion, and an admission of the need for politics-as-unusual. It says: “The inauguration of a new Parliament building is a momentous occasion… we were open to sinking our differences…” This is followed, however, by a listing of reasons why these 19 parties will stay away from Sunday’s event. Those reasons cannot be dismissed lightly. 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. There is also, as these parties point out, a disharmonious political context in which the new Parliament will open — from the disqualification of Opposition members (read Rahul Gandhi) to the disruption of the House by the Treasury benches, from controversial laws passed without debate to the relegation of parliamentary committees. This fraught context is made, most recently, of the Centre’s Delhi ordinance, that seeks to roll back the apex court’s verdict and wrest control of the capital’s administration from its elected government. So yes, the Opposition has its reasons. And yet, it is urgent that the 19 parties retrace their steps, and go back to the acknowledgement and admission at the beginning of their own statement.

In the life of a nation, there are institutions and moments that rise above the politics of the day, and touch what lies underneath. The institution of Parliament is one such. It is the House of debate where the people’s voice is heard through their representatives and the government is called to account. That Parliament has not lived up to its promise and possibility is an old story given new urgency by the BJP’s unwillingness or inability to reach out across the aisle and strike a conversation. Today, the House is a shrunken place, and the project of building a new Parliament, which began in a lockdown amid a pandemic, has also been unable to shake off the narrowness of political spirit that pervades it. 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.

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Of course, this is also the run-up to the big political face-off of 2024, and therefore, a despite-it-all generosity will be hard to find in government and Opposition both. 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.