Parliament moves house: Shivanand Tiwari remembers 2G ‘scam’ time, Manmohan Singh ‘sitting helplessly’

“We used to sit in the Central Hall regularly where Cabinet ministers would also come. It does not happen anymore. Towards the end of my tenure, it was a tumultuous time in the Parliament. The CAG’s report on 2G spectrum allocation had come out and newspaper headlines screamed ‘Rs 1.8 lakh crore’. It was shocking. I was representing JD(U) and reached Rajya Sabha in the morning. Where I used to sit, on one side was Yechury (CPM leader Sitaram Yechury) and on the other was Mayawati. I started waving the newspaper and making some noise,” Tiwari reminisces.

As other leaders gathered around him, Tiwari says, he saw the then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who was present in the House, walking towards him.

“At first I was kind of taken aback to see PM walk up to me. He then politely told me that a committee was going to discuss all of it and that we should not create ruckus. We said, ‘just say this on the floor of the House and we will go quiet’,” Tiwari recalls.

However, as the Opposition members kept demanding answers from the Congress-led UPA government as the proceedings of the Upper House began, there was no statement from the PM, Tiwari says.

“It was heartbreaking to see PM sit helplessly as Opposition badgered the government. Around the same time the CWG Games irregularities came to the fore and the government was on the backfoot (again). It eventually led to the rise of Narendra Modi,” the RJD leader observes.

Tiwari quit the JD(U) after being denied renomination for the Rajya Sabha

after his term ended. Nitish offered him the party’s ticket for the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, but he refused to contest and later joined the RJD.

According to Tiwari, the Parliament was conducted with greater decorum in the period when he was an MP. “There was some gravity to Parliament. The debates had a certain standard. People got ample time to speak and the Chair maintained its dignity,” he says.