“The election results have placed exceptional power and authority in the prime minister’s hands…all power is concentrated in New Delhi…Central ministers have been reduced to courtiers at the Delhi Durbar…the prime minister’s secretariat has become a parallel cabinet…the Prime Minister is standing at the pinnacle and her colleagues are lying at her feet…Is this situation not fraught with the dangerous possibility of one individual getting established as a dictator?…These days the atmosphere in New Delhi makes one choke. It is not easy to breathe freely. Raising a voice of dissent is looked upon as a revolt…the chanting of the Prime Minister’s name on All India Radio from morning to night, saturated propaganda on Cinema screens…how can those sitting in the Opposition fight all this?”
These are words from 1972, bellowed out by then opposition leader Atal Bihari Vajpayee against Indira Gandhi in Parliament. They could be accurately used to describe the situation prevailing today: a suffocatingly domineering government and the Narendra Modi personality cult which is systematically invisibilising the opposition in the blind pursuit of a One Leader-One Party electoral autocracy.
The chants of “Modi, Modi,” raised by BJP MPs in the Lok Sabha on the first day of the Budget session are not just unprecedented but signal an ugly subordination of Parliament to an individual personality cult. The chants also reveal an ignorance of what Parliament symbolises – Parliament is the elected legislature of a democracy where all parties and all MPs are equal as they have all been elected by citizens of differing political opinions. Every member is elected and every member represents the citizen. Parliament is the home of the Opposition – in parliamentary democracies, the Opposition has no executive role, it is on the floor of the house where it functions and where it calls the government to account.
Vajpayee emerged as the stalwart leader that he was in the 1950s and 1960s because of the space and platform he had in Parliament – Nehruvian parliamentary democracy made possible the emergence of Nehru’s greatest opponents.
The belief that the party which enjoys a majority has the right to convert the House into a partisan hall where only one party’s leader will be hailed is an appalling overthrow of the norms and rules of parliamentary behaviour, and reveals a brute majoritarian mindset. Modi may be the supreme leader of his party, and after the big state election victories, deserves to be hailed as the consummate political leader that he is. But such “Modi Modi” chants should be raised at BJP party headquarters, and not on the floor of the legislature where all parties sit on equal footing, and no one individual can claim supremacy.
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Today, that the Lok Sabha speaker chooses not to intervene while he routinely shuts off opposition voices of dissent – even the TV cameras seem to be fixated only on the treasury benches – is reflective of how constitutional figures too now are party loyalists above all else.
One of the fundamental differences between the first BJP prime minister, Vajpayee, and his BJP successor, Modi, is the fact that unlike Modi, Vajpayee was a parliamentarian for close to half a century, from 1957 to 2006. Modi entered Parliament for the first time in 2014 and has never worked as a politician without access to state power. He began his political career by being catapulted to the chair of Gujarat chief minister in 2001, and unabashedly uses instruments of the state – from intelligence agencies to police to ministries – to play partisan politics.
Vajpayee did not get access to the instruments of state power until the very end of his political life when he became prime minister at 72 (he was foreign minister for two years in 1977-1979 during the Janata government), and was always a man of the opposition, tilting against a gargantuan Nehru and Indira Gandhi led Congress for almost all his life. The rules and norms of Parliament were sacred for Vajpayee because they enabled his own voice to be heard. In Parliament, MPs must operate according to his golden rule: Maryada mein rehkar, seemayon ke bheetar (Upholding the honour of the House, staying within limits).
“Constitutional democracy is a system, there are rules, there are procedures, don’t break them,” he said in a speech in 1996. “The entire world is watching India’s democracy,” Vajpayee said in August 1994 when he received the Outstanding Parliamentarian Award. “We cannot make the mistake of failing it. Whenever I falter, (this award) will tell me not to make the mistake of wavering from the (democratic) path.” We can accuse Vajpayee of failing the test of constitutional democracy many times, but we can never accuse him of neglecting the norms and rules and procedures of Parliament.
Today’s BJP dispensation has destroyed the Vajpayee version of Parliament. The prime minister rarely attends, and when he does it is mainly for rhetorical campaign-style speeches, not to answer questions or participate in a debate. The nullification of Article 370 or the Citizenship (Amendment) Act legislation or the farm laws were brought in without rigorous and free debate. Less than 10% bills are sent to standing committees. Parliament has been reduced to a “rubber stamp” or a “notice board”. Twitter, Facebook and mass media have enabled politicians to build personality cults without needing to perform in Parliament through debating power or oratorical brilliance. There is a disjunction between parliamentary performance and electability. TMC’s Mahua Moitra is a stellar parliamentarian yet requires the personality cult of Mamata Banerjee to win her Bengal seat.
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“You got more than 400 seats in the Lok Sabha…” Vajpayee told the Rajiv Gandhi government in Parliament in March 1987, “But the country’s problems cannot be solved on the strength of one party. One individual, however popular, cannot find a way out of complicated problems. You need political consensus for that.”
Is today’s Modi government abiding by Vajpayee’s advice? Modi scorns consensus, secure in brute electoral majorities. The opposition is called all kinds of names, from ‘tukde tukde gang’ to ‘Khan Market gang’. The Modi government speaks of an ‘Opposition mukt Bharat.’ Attempts are made to entirely delegitimise the opposition. There is a yawning abyss between government and opposition leaders as many of the latter find themselves at the receiving end of persecution from ED and IT departments. Modi does not like to be questioned and never answers questions in Parliament. Vajpayee, the diehard opposition parliamentarian, would not be able to recognise or function in the electoral autocracy that is today’s India.
Sagarika Ghose is the author of a new biography, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, India’s Most Loved Prime Minister.