AA Edit | No-Trust Bitterness Behind, Parliament Turns New Leaf

The Lok Sabha voted down a rare motion to remove its Speaker last week but it created no bad blood amidst the Treasury benches and the Opposition, instead, leading to a better understanding between the two sides, which led to the revocation of the suspension of eight Opposition members from the House. The Opposition, on its part, committed itself to helping run the House as per the rules and vowed not to violate them. The Question Hour was conducted with the seriousness due to it. In the Rajya Sabha, the leaders of both sides paid rich tributes to the retiring members, and sworn enemies even engaged in friendly banter on their political choices. These are sights every Indian would want to see every day when the Houses meet.

India chose the parliamentary system and adopted federal principles over the presidential and unitary models because only such a system can represent and accommodate the multifariousness of an India which is multi-cultural, multi-lingual, multi-ethnic… in fact a mosaic of everything that is available among human beings anywhere in the world. It is eminently expected that such people will have sharp differences over the way society must be run, and the political parties they form will have ideologies which could run parallel to each other. The fault lines are indeed all too easy to discover and widen, leading to fissures, till the eventual confusion and collapse.

But the Parliament is the platform which can turn this tide. It is the place where representatives of voters who hold equal rights express themselves and engage in the process of finding solutions to their problems. It is the place where the said fault lines are sealed and areas of commonality and togetherness are found and nurtured. The Indian Parliament has for all these decades, functioned as the microcosm of the Indian society. People on either side accorded the highest priority to its sessions when India started off as a republic. Parliamentary debates were keenly attended. Prime Ministers would not skip the sessions and would, instead, listen carefully to the worlds of wisdom that have their roots in the vastness of Indian villages and cities. They helped form better ideas to address people’s issues.

The verve, however, was lost somewhere in the journey, and the same House was reduced into an acrimony shop where no one is heard, much less understood. Formations resorted to competitive disruption that led to total washout of sessions. Even members of the ruling formation did not mind creating ruckus in the Houses for days on end. Meaningful discussions on bills, a key ingredient of lawmaking, the prime function of Parliament, became a rare instance. Laws bore the signs of a lack of application of mind by the lawmakers. Burning issues people faced never got the attention of the rulers for the simple reason that the Parliament was not functioning.

If the latest signals that are emanating from Parliament are a sign to go by, it would mean that it is rediscovering its role in Indian life in a way that it was intended to. Let good sense prevail for the greater common good.