The irony of protest

The Winter Session of Parliament has not witnessed a single full day’s legislative work. Anyone who switches on the television will see how the Opposition parties troop into the well the moment the two Houses assemble and start shouting slogans. It is of little moment to these parties that the 2G issue was raised on the basis of a leaked CAG report. The former minister for telecom, A. Raja, resigned the moment the CAG report was tabled in Parliament. The 2G matter was thereafter taken up by the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) headed by the Bharatiya Janata Party’s senior leader Murli Manohar Joshi. Since then, Mr Joshi has gone on record to say that the PAC was the best forum to study the CAG report.
The government has repeatedly appealed to the Opposition to allow Parliament to function and to come forward to discuss the issue so that all the facts may come to light. However, the Opposition — bereft of both responsibility and concern for the people who elected them — continues to disrupt the Houses, chanting constantly that the only way forward will be the appointment of a joint parliamentary committee. It is irrelevant to them that when in power, either on Kargilgate, the Tehelka scam or the Vijay scam involving defence purchases, the innumerable times between 1999 and 2003 when the CAG repeatedly castigated the National Democratic Alliance government for various scams regarding undervaluation in disinvestment, whether for the disinvestment of Balco, BSNL, Paradip or Modern Foods, the NDA persistently refused to appoint a JPC. They keep up the self-serving chant that the JPC can be the only way forward.
All appeals to them that Parliament is the highest democratic institution in the land and should not be subverted in such a callous way draws only the meaningless response that it is the duty of the government to run Parliament. If the logic follows that the duty of the government is to obey every politically expedient, self-serving diktat of the Opposition or otherwise the Opposition will not allow Parliament to function, they will rush to the well and scream slogans and disrupt the proceedings of the Houses and still it continues to be the responsibility of the government to make the Houses function all that can be said is that we are now witnessing sad days in our parliamentary history.
It is nobody’s case that political parties cannot or do not occasionally use the device of walking out or stalling Parliament to make a political point. But these are and were always meant to be symbolic gestures. Today, however, we have seen 15 straight days of the disruption of Parliament at the cost of approximately `26,000 per minute to the taxpaying citizens. Some estimates have placed the cost of wasted Parliament hours at approximately `65 crore up to the present time. The Opposition retorts that the cost to the taxpayer due to notional and alleged losses as a result of 2G is a great deal more. However, they have no answer to the valid issue raised by the government that they should come to Parliament, discuss the issue threadbare, follow the developments in the Supreme Court-monitored probe into the matter and then ensure that the guilty, if any, are brought to book. But the Opposition obstructionism has little to do with reason. They have neither logic nor fact or precedent to rely on but only an ideologically bankrupt and politically irresponsible strategy to disrupt democracy.
The great illusionist Houdini would be hard put to match the contortions of the BJP in explaining how they adopt such a blatant double standard in political life: one for Bengaluru and another for Delhi. Karnataka chief minister B.S. Yeddyurappa has admitted openly that he and his Cabinet denotified government land and gave it away to his family members for their personal gain.
The admitted facts are as follows. His sons Raghavendra and Vijayendra were allotted 60,984 sq feet in Arkavathy Layout, Bengaluru, for `1 crore when the market value was `15.24 crore. He denotified `175 crore worth of residential property in Banashankari to benefit Sagar Health, where his sons are partners. His family owned firm Fluid Technologies got two acres in Bengaluru industrial hub Harohalli for `84 lakhs, when the value was `8.7 crore. He used the chief minister’s discretionary powers to allot Raghavendra a plot worth `3 crore for just `8 lakhs. His daughter and sister were not left out of his largesse. They too received land at throwaway prices causing crores in losses to the state. All this is admitted by Mr Yeddyurappa himself. And what does the BJP say? Nothing has been proved and an inquiry has been instituted. The people of India want to answer that Bengaluru is not so far from Delhi that it can have a different definition of corruption.
The BJP, which pontificates about its ride to victory in Bihar, appears horribly ambivalent about Mr Yeddyurappa. The central leadership of the BJP is either incapable of enforcing integrity and discipline within its own party or is totally complicit in the open corruption of Mr Yeddyurappa. Either of these assumptions is fatal to the perception of the country’s leading Opposition party. In the meanwhile, Mr Yeddyurappa’s Cabinet colleague, Katta Subramaniam, has resigned on proven corruption charges and the Lokayukta has filed an FIR against him.
Can the central leadership of the BJP explain its deafening silence in response to the charge of the Karnataka Lokayukta, that the so-called probe instituted by Mr Yeddyurappa into the huge Karnataka land scam was nothing more than a blatant attempt to take the issue away from the non-partisan jurisdiction of the Lokayukta and to bury the matter? Can the BJP explain why it uses one yardstick for Bengaluru and another for Parliament? They cannot.
The wise electorate of Karnataka will ensure that Mr Yeddyurappa and the BJP get their just desserts when the time comes. Meanwhile, the BJP should understand that Parliament of India, the voice of its citizens, cannot be indefinitely stifled.

Jayanthi Natarajan is a Congress MP in the Rajya Sabha and AICC spokesperson.
The views expressed in this column are her own.