Cong, BJP & the corruption roundabout

With the reappointment of senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Murli Manohar Joshi as chairman of Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC), the grave danger of the collapse of the entire parliamentary committee system has been averted. For, had not Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar decided to stick to the established convention

and thus disregard the clamour within a large section of the Congress to keep Dr Joshi out, the principal Opposition party would almost certainly have withdrawn its members from all committees of Parliament. However, any comfort the country wishes to draw from this can only be limited, because the face-off between the two sides over the 2G issue is by no means over and can revert to the ugly ruckus that nearly tore apart and discredited Parliament’s oldest and most respected committee.
The Congress has already sent to the new committee a team of “formidable” members with the avowed objective of “taking on” Dr Joshi. Nor is it a mere coincidence that the Union minister for parliamentary affairs, Pavan Bansal, has issued a statement fiercely critical of the PAC chairman. Moreover, the looming uncertainty is compounded by some other factors. Paramount among these is that at the time of writing, the Speaker’s verdict on the status of what Dr Joshi claims to be the “PAC report on 2G” that he submitted over the weekend, is still awaited.
To any independent observer, however, it is obvious that the document in question is at best a draft report that never received the collective endorsement of the PAC as a whole. According to Dr Joshi, he had adjourned the committee’s meeting because members belonging to the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) made it impossible to continue the proceedings. Where then is the question of there being a report of the PAC on 2G?
On the other hand, the conduct of the UPA members of the PAC, after the adjournment of the meeting a day before the end of its tenure, was much worse than anything that Dr Joshi, his party and its allies have done so far or are trying to do. The nine UPA members of the committee, with the support of a member each from the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party, arrogated to themselves the right to “remove” the PAC chairman and “elect” his replacement (who else but Saifuddin Soz of the Congress?), throwing to the winds the basic canon that the PAC chairman is appointed by the Speaker after ascertaining the wishes of the Opposition. Thereafter, claiming that they represented a clear majority of the 21-member PAC, these 11 members trashed the draft report and rejected it out of hand. Not content with this, they showered all kinds of epithets on Dr Joshi. Union Cabinet minister Kapil Sibal, with a gift of the gab, remarked: “It was a Joshi report, and it has now become a doshi (guilty) report”. Since then both sides have been trading charges of subversion of the Constitution.
There is a further, rather alarming, twist to the sordid tale. Ever since Independence, reports of all parliamentary committees, not just the PAC, are privileged until presented to the House. In the days when I used to cover Parliament, any violation of this norm used to invite sharp rebuke from the Chair and the only escape hatch for the guilty party was “unqualified apology”. All this seems to have gone with the wind. The 270-page, explosive draft report of the PAC was available to every single TV channel and newspaper and all of them merrily broadcast its every juicy detail. Does it require great cogitation to guess in whose interest the massive leakage was?
From the foregoing flow two very depressing and disturbing conclusions emerge. First, over long years the authority, prestige and dignity of Parliament have been constantly and systematically eroded by the untruly from among its own members. Successive presiding officers of the two Houses have lamented this and tried to stem the disastrous trend but to no avail. So far parliamentary committees had managed to function smoothly and efficaciously. Are they also on the block now, especially if the new PAC again takes up the draft report on 2G, currently hanging in midair like Trishanku, or starts considering the Commonwealth Games scandal or any other of the scams bedevilling the UPA-2 government?
Therein lies the clue to the second conclusion emanating from the ugly confrontation and conflict within the outgoing PAC: Partisan politics of an extremely squalid kind has made any rational discussion on such vital problems as the scourge of corruption eating into the vitals of the country more or less impossible. Any attempt to come to grips with it immediately degenerates into a no-holds-barred war of words between the Congress and the BJP. It matters little whether the forum is a closed-door meeting of the PAC or a high-decibel TV talk show.
The impression is growing that the burning issue of corruption gets sidetracked because in the highly polarised political atmosphere between the two mainstream parties, the BJP seems intent only on blaming Congress and UPA leaders, individually and collectively, for everything that has gone wrong. The Congress and its allies hit back that the record of the BJP, at present as well as in the past, is much worse, and therefore the latter has no right to speak. For the saffron party this becomes the “clinching proof” that the Congress’ sole purpose is to “defend” and “perpetuate” corruption. There are, of course, wheels within wheels. At times Dr Joshi seems to be targeting both the Congress and some of his BJP colleagues simultaneously.
The crowning irony is that all this dismal drama is taking place at a time when it appeared as if India had indeed united against corruption. First, it was the messy aftermath of Anna Hazare’s triumphal fast at Jantar Mantar, and now the virtual civil war in the PAC. Can anything be more pernicious and perverse?