(Mani Shankar Aiyar is a Congress MP in the Rajya Sabha.)Most bullies are cowards. What else could be the explanation for Modi refusing to come before the Rajya Sabha for five full days? He is after all a renowned orator. He also claims to be in full command of his ranks. Why then allow five days of legislative business in which his government has a vested interest to be indefinitely postponed only because he shies away from being held responsible by the House for the lapses of his legislators and ministers? He is, after all, not just the Prime Minister. He is also a Member of Parliament. And it is his first business to be available in the House when Parliamentary business demands his presence. Even the meanest and smallest of us have to heed a three-line whip. What could be more important for nurturing our democracy than a Prime Minister who believes it is his duty to sit in the House, listen to the debate and then defend himself as best as he can?
My mind flies back more than half a century to my first visit to the Lok Sabha. The year was 1960. The month, I seem to remember, was February. A friend far better connected than I, as a small-town hick could hope to be, had secured passes for himself and a few friends to attend a debate in Parliament. The debate was on the most exciting event of the time - the dismissal by the Union government under Jawaharlal Nehru of the first-ever elected Communist government in history, the government of Chief Minister EMS Namboodiripad in Kerala. The State government had nationalized all schooling in the state. Since many of the educational institutions were run by Christians, including the 2,000-year-old Syrian Christian community, there was outrage at this abrupt end to private education which had propelled Kerala to the first position in school and college education in the country. People had taken to the streets in large numbers, and Indira Gandhi, as President of the Congress, had seized the opportunity to lead the protestors. As public order broke down, Nehru's government resorted to President's rule. The motion before the House was to debate the merits of the action taken. The Nehru government was clearly on the back-foot.
The bus we took from college deposited us at the Parliament House bus-stand, which was then sited at the very spot where Mahatma Gandhi's statue is now seated. We took our place in the Visitors' Gallery and then listened spell-bound to Comrade SA Dange flailing Nehru and the Congress for the error of their ways. He was listened to in pin-drop silence, Nehru in deep thought just in front of him and the Treasury benches in disciplined decorum, writhing in their seats but not interrupting or erupting into slogans. Dange ended his speech in words that reverberate in my memory 50 years and more later. Comparing Nehru to Yudhishthira, whose chariot always rode above the ground for he never told a lie, Dange recalled that when Yudhishthira was persuaded to tell the white lie that Ashwatthama was dead - misleading Dronacharya to believe his son had died when in fact it was the elephant, Ashwatthama, that had been killed - Yudhishthira's chariot fell to the ground. So, said Dange, had Nehru's chariot fallen to the ground with this one action of his.
Nehru then rose to reply. I remember nothing of his rebuttal. What remains in memory is of the doughty warrior fully observing Parliamentary protocol and democratic proprieties by giving the others every chance to have their say, and taking their barbs on his chest, before rising to defend his actions.
That is what we have been expecting of Modi. But he has shown himself to be indifferent to democratic practice and contemptuous of Parliament - or merely just frightened of public reprimand - to come to the House and bear like a man "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune". Instead, he has simpered - rushing off to Kashmir to campaign when he should have been facing the House. A sign, perhaps, of how nervous he is that the J&K elections will signal the end of the Modi wave.
I recall too finding, in the middle of the Kargil war, on the back page of
The Hindustan Times of 26 October 1962, a small news item informing readers that the leader of the Jan Sangh in the Rajya Sabha, one Atal Behari Vajpayee, then all of 36 years of age, had called on the Prime Minister, then 72, twice Vajpayee's age, to demand that although the Lok Sabha was in recess, the Rajya Sabha be called immediately to discuss the then ongoing war on the India-China border. Unlike Vajpayee 1999, who refused a similar request, Nehru agreed with alacrity. The Rajya Sabha was summoned on 8 November 1962 and young Vajpayee launched into a vitriolic attack on the Prime Minister that the Prime Minister of the day bore with his usual dignity and then responded to with Parliamentary punctiliousness. If that 'Gentle Colossus', as Hiren Mukherjee described him, had not thus nurtured democratic institutions, India today, like all 150 countries that have come to liberation since our Independence, might also be floundering like neighbouring Pakistan.
Modi does not seem to realize how fragile is the plant of Parliamentary democracy. Perhaps he does not even want to tend the plant so that he can always and all times have his own way, just like all the authoritarians who disfigure the pages of history. However that may be, the fact is that the Prime Minister has refused to heed the majority call in the Upper House that he come to Parliament to listen to what his fellow-Parliamentarians have to say about the conduct of his Partymen, his backbenchers and his Ministers. He considers his Home Minister as his inferior in everything but responding to Parliament!
Nehru, on the other hand, had never flinched from his democratic duty. Whether it was the jeep scandal in the early years of Parliament or the Mundhra scandal that rocked the House in 1957-58 at his own son-in-law's instance, there would be Nehru sitting at his appointed place in the House, ever willing to listen with quiet dignity to whatever was hurled at him and to respond in measured tones to whatever had been alleged. More - to take action. For he had suspended in 1952 the first Congress MP charged with manipulating the stock market and then had removed his much-favoured Finance Minster, TTK, for the sins of Mundhra. He even allowed Lal Bahadur Shastri to follow his conscience when, as Railway Minister, Shastri resigned over a rail accident at Ariyalur in distant Tamil Nadu.
Modi prefers to cling to his discredited colleagues. A man accused of rape continues to adorn his Council of Ministers. The intemperate Giriraj Singh, who wants all those who do not vote for Modi to be hounded out to Pakistan, is rewarded with a Ministerial assignment. A lady who does not deserve the name of lady because of her preference for filthy language remains on her perch. A back-bencher, swathed in a
sadhu's robes, who appears to have more of the Devil than God on his tongue, is allowed, indeed encouraged, to get on with nonsense directed against another religious community.
This is what the country has got from voting in a die-hard RSS
pracharak as Prime Minister. His extremist cohorts receive the Prime Minister's protection because they speak the Prime Minister's thoughts. We have never had a more dangerous threat to our national unity than this authoritarian who little respects the sanctum sanctorum of our democracy despite having hypocritically kissed its doorstep when first stepping into its sacred precincts.
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