Disruption has reduced Parliament to a political orgy
Disruption is the new buzzword in the world of infotech, innovation and investment. Anybody with an idea that is extraordinarily brilliant and hence unsettling for what prevails as the stagnant norm is perceived as disrupting the status quo. Sometimes it works to the benefit of both innovator and industry, at times the disruption proves meaningless, causing loss and setting back progress.
Whatever the outcome, disruption hits the headlines and makes news for both wrong and right reasons. We are witnessing something similar in our politics. The highest common denominator, the nation's well-being through economic growth, development and individual prosperity, has been supplanted by the lowest common denominator, cheap populism, opportunism and cynicism.
Disquiet
Disruptive politics may have been fashionable in the 1960s through the 1980s, but in retrospect it yielded nothing more than fulfilment of personal agendas, ambitions and aggrandisement in the name of serving the nation and its people. The nation remained stuck in a groove, the people remained mired in poverty. The world's largest democracy was also the world's biggest joke. Yet this harsh truth is lost on those who are now striving to revive the politics of disruption, in the guise of dissent and disquiet.
Two successive sessions of Parliament have been washed out, important legislation has been stalled and meaningful debate on policy and programme scuttled by taking recourse to disruption. Retro could not have made a more dramatic comeback. The massive mandate given by the people to PM Narendra Modi in 2014 has been virtually vetoed by a cussed Opposition.
The belief that the formation of a government with a majority of its own for the first time in the last three decades would fetch decisive governance has been violated by abusing the infirmity of our parliamentary system.
Nothing illustrates this better than the fact that legislation passed in the Lok Sabha, where the Modi sarkar has the numbers, has been blocked in the Rajya Sabha, where the Congress and its allies have the numbers.
The Upper House was conceived as the House of Elders where wisdom would prevail over partisan politics. It is now a chamber of naysayers. On one pretext or the other, the Congress has disrupted proceedings in the Rajya Sabha. The Congress MPs wouldn't let the House function because of court summons to their supreme leader Sonia Gandhi and dynast Rahul in a criminal case involving alleged malfeasance in acquisition of National Herald properties. The established norm of not entering the Well of the House was disrupted.
Also disrupted was the honour that once attached to political fidelity. We saw scenes of sworn enemies joining hands with no other purpose than preventing what Parliament is funded by taxpayers to do: debate, deliberate and legislate. That the CPI(M) would make common cause with the Trinamool Congress, and that both would join hands with the Congress, was unimaginable till it happened.
Politics does make for strange bedfellows. Disruptionist politics makes for strangers abandoning common sense precautions for the momentary gratification fetched by a political orgy. This is not about the Opposition performing its indisputably important role in a multi-party democracy. This is vetoing the choice of the masses because they rejected India's venal ruling classes. This is caste tyranny at play - an OBC may represent popular aspirations, but remains unacceptable in Lutyens' Delhi.
The Congress believed its manufactured narrative of victimhood by spinning the court summons to Sonia and Rahul as "political vendetta" would recreate the sympathy wave that rehabilitated Indira Gandhi during the post-Emergency Janata rule. Sonia even invoked her mother-in-law's name (notably, not her husband's name who fought back charges in the Bofors scandal) and Rahul accused the PMO of vendetta.
Dynasty
But the glycerine tears of rage did not work. India today is different from India in 1977-80. Information flow has ensured that the masses are not easily misled. The dynasty is despised as never before. The judiciary has long ceased to be "committed".
And, the incumbent government is not a gaggle of squabbling politicians chasing loaves and fishes of office. Modi is neither Morarji Desai nor Charan Singh. Indeed, truth be told, he is neither AB Vajpayee nor LK Advani.
There may or may not have been a scripted proverbial Plan B. But it happened nonetheless, further fuelling disruption and stalling legislation in the closing days of winter session. The CBI's raid on premises linked to Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal's principal secretary Rajendra Kumar provided a new platform for launching a vicious attack on the government.
Politics of disruption transmogrified into politics of brazen blackmail. Slighted that his favourite bureaucrat should be investigated for graft, Kejriwal struck back with a volley of charges against Union finance minister Arun Jaitley, digging up allegations of corruption in the DDCA that had already been looked into by the SFIO (serious fraud investigation office ) when the Congress was in power. Jaitley has many detractors but even his worst enemy would swear by his integrity and probity.
Downside
The Congress has latched on to those charges and the DDCA has become the reason to disrupt the Rajya Sabha, snuffing out flickering hope that the GST Bill, the Real Estate Bill, the Arbitration Bill, and other pending bills would be passed before Parliament adjourns.
Economic reforms that are crucial to keep the world interested in the India story have been put off to another day.
Kejriwal setting up a cockamamie inquiry commission headed by a lawyer whose antipathy towards the government of the day is no secret; Ram Jethmalani, reviled and abused by the AAP till yesterday, now defending Kejriwal and his cronies in court; and finally a BJP backbencher MP, Kirti Azad, being beckoned by Sonia to disrupt proceedings in the Lok Sabha - all this makes for eyeball-grabbing headlines, TRP-driving primetime shows. But what does it do to India?
What does it do to the masses waiting in eager anticipation for delivery? And, what does it do to India's image in a world teeming with competitors for investment and technology and jobs?
Disruption has its downside. We are suffering that, as a nation, as a people.
(Courtesy of Mail Today.)