Mithun Chakraborty resigns from Rajya Sabha
Bollywood superstar and Trinamool Congress leader Mithun Chakraborty on Monday resigned from the Rajya Sabha on health grounds. Trinamool sources…
Disgraceful but true is the fact that a washed out session is no longer “the rarest of the rare” situations as far as India’s apex legislature is concerned. Alas, the extreme penalty the highest court in the land had approved when dealing with such matters cannot be applied to over-paid, under-worked MPs whose conduct has given an unwholesome new meaning to the term “un-parliamentary” ~ for now a couple of days of smooth, acrimony-free functioning qualifies for that “rarest of the rare” description. Even before both the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha were adjourned sine die on Friday, the winter session had been written-off as a “washout “.
In reality it could prove much worse, the pertinent question is whether under the prevailing political circumstances the hallowed system of parliamentary democracy stands a chance of meaningful survival. The legislature is a creature of “precedence”, what happens today sets the norms and conventions for tomorrow.
Sadly, only the most unbecoming of precedents are followed up with regularity, and the closing homilies from the Speaker of the Lok Saha and Chairman of the Rajya Sabha are forgotten, or ignored, before the subsequent session commences.
So disgusted with what transpired during the session was that veteran parliamentarian, LK Advani, that he openly wondered if it was worthwhile retaining membership of the Lok Sabha — and the Chairman of the Rajya Sabha was lethally accurate when he noted that the House was in order only when obituaries were being read.
Taken together, those comments (and recall what the President had opined only days earlier) indicate that the death-knell of the institution can be heard with increasing loudness. The statistics-conscious have calculated that this was the least-productive session in the past 15 years, but there really is little need to add up the hours wasted (for which the tax-payer picks up the bill) and other “conventional” assessments of collective ineptitude.
For the real “crime” of the winter session is that it exacerbated the political divide to seemingly unbridgeable lengths, and rather than work towards reconciliation the combat-obsessed government sought to counter the demonetisation distress with the helicopter-scam whirlwind. Personal animosity spilled over into virtual hatred, political opponents degenerated into enemies.
In this slugfest between “good guys and bad guys” the citizen was the casualty, the elected representatives of the people provided them neither solace nor succour since gaining political advantage was all that mattered. The “wisdom” of Parliament was slaughtered at the altar of perceived expediency, and the sole yardstick that seemed relevant was electoral success or failure ~ that is what Indian democracy has been reduced to.
When a comparative crisis was inflicted upon the nation in 1975 none dared speak out ~ in 2016 Parliament “censored” itself.
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