In September, 2012, senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader and former Union external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj gave a terse response to Manmohan Singh, prime minister at the time, who had accused the saffron party of negating democracy by stalling parliament’s functioning over the alleged coal block allocation scam.
“Not allowing parliament to function is also a form of democracy like any other form,” she argued, blaming a series of corruption cases against the UPA-II government at the time for such disruptions.
A year later, another BJP veteran Arun Jaitley defended his party’s protest and subsequent walk-outs in the Upper House over the naming of 20 BJP and Telugu Desam Party MPs in the House bulletin for violating parliamentary rules. He contended that only opposition legislators were singled out for such a shaming exercise, while those in the treasury benches who created similar ruckus had been let off easily.
More than a decade down the line, however, it took prime minister Narendra Modi to rekindle the debate on the legitimacy of parliamentary disruptions in democracy, except that this time around he and his party were at the other end of the spectrum. Speaking ahead of the winter session of 2024, Modi described the opposition protests in parliament as a form of “hijacking”.
“…Some individuals rejected by the people are continuously attempting to control parliament through disruptive tactics for their political gains,” he said, while urging the opposition colleagues to allow parliament to function smoothly.
“…Those who have been continuously rejected by the public ignore the words of their colleagues and disrespect their sentiments and that of democracy,” he said. His supporters and other BJP leaders have hammered down his contention since then that any form of parliamentary disruption amounts to nothing but a conspiracy to stall India’s development.
The big media, too, has buttressed the prime minister’s claims. But it has also used the noise to deflect attention from the repeated demand by opposition members to discuss certain issues that the Modi government has concertedly circumvented.
The current point of discord between the treasury and opposition benches is the Adani group’s indictment in the US over bribery charges. Given the fact that the Congress and many others in the opposition have consistently raised questions around the apparent nexus of the Union government and the industrial house, its requests and demands to have a discussion on the issue have been denied with equal force by the BJP in parliament.
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The opposition’s demands to discuss steps that the government has taken – or not taken – to defuse tensions in conflict-torn Manipur have also been put down numerous times. The government and its ministers have instead preferred to issue vapid statements over the burning issue.
Such has been the government’s reticence in indulging the opposition on issues of concern, or even putting out its own side of the story, that the opposition has often found that boycotting or walking out remains the only option.
There has been an unprecedented rise in notices under Rule 267 – a parliamentary provision that calls for suspending the listed business of the house to take up urgent matters of discussion. As the big media blames the opposition for the logjam and a possible wash-out of the winter session, the Lok Sabha speaker and the Rajya Sabha’s deputy chairman have steadfastly refused to entertain some significant discussions under Rule 267. Some of these pertain to the Manipur violence, the promised special assistance to the flood-hit Wayanad district of Kerala, and even violence against Hindus in Bangladesh – all issues that could put the BJP in a political or a diplomatic spot.
The BJP’s record in the treasury benches is far worse than that of the UPA-II government. For instance, when Sushma Swaraj explained the philosophical underpinnings of a working democracy in 2012 while defending her party’s protests in parliament, the Manmohan government had actually agreed to discuss the alleged coal-block scam that was then a matter of debate. One may also recall that the Nirbhaya gangrape case was discussed in both houses for days, as opposing parties held the government to task for failing to put systemic deterrents in place. Those discussions eventually led to a new law on sexual assault.
The saffron party, on the other hand, has used parliament as yet another platform for its own political messaging. It has attempted to impose Hindi as the primary language of discussions, preventing MPs from communicating in their languages of convenience. The leaders of the houses have acted less as neutral observers but as BJP spokespersons in the chair, so much so that they have allowed the microphones of opposition MPs to be muted during their attacks on the government. That the house proceedings in the past decade have been so one-sided can be gauged from the extraordinary rise in the number of expunctions of critical remarks from the speeches of opposition MPs.
Recently, Modi and his cabinet even went on to use the parliament’s library to screen a Hindutva propaganda movie The Sabarmati Report.
Modi’s last two tenures have also witnessed the worst-ever attendance record of a prime minister in parliament. Moreover, the PM has used his motion of thanks response as electoral speeches for television without explaining his government’s positions on the questions raised in parliament. His government’s response to almost every question has mostly been banal and evasive. Several bills have been passed without a debate because of the NDA’s brute majority in the Lok Sabha. Opposition MPs have often complained of the fact that they were not provided copies of the bills or given very little time to study the drafts before they were passed in haste.
For the BJP, this is a stark U-turn – from one when its leaders spoke about diverse forms of democratic action to register the opposition’s voice to one in which all democratic and constitutional institutions are tightly controlled to advance the BJP’s electoral dominance.
Modi’s statement that opposition MPs have been “rejected” by people at once undermines not only the role of duly elected opposition legislators but also a majority of Indian voters who gave the BJP a dressing down in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls. If the “hijacking” of parliament is truly cause for concern in India’s backsliding democracy, one knows whom to blame.
This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire & Galileo Ideas – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.
