The beginning of the second part of the budget session of Parliament on Monday, if it is to be taken as an indication, does not strengthen the hope that the work in the second part will be relatively peaceful and orderly.
On the first day, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh in Lok Sabha and Leader of the House in Rajya Sabha Piyush Goyal raised the issue of alleged humiliation of the country on foreign soil and said that Congress leader Rahul Gandhi should apologize for this.
The ruckus that started after that left no option but to adjourn the meeting of both the Houses.
A day ago, during a public program in Karnataka, Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself, without naming Rahul Gandhi, had said that attacking Indian democracy on foreign soil is an insult to the country which cannot be tolerated.
Looking at his tough stance, it was clear that the ruling party would adopt an aggressive approach on this issue during the Parliament session. Although the opposition had also made its preparations.
On Monday itself, a meeting of the leaders of 16 opposition parties was held in the Parliament House, in which it was specifically decided to focus on the alleged misuse of investigative agencies and on the Adani issue.
Keep in mind, in the first part of the budget session, the confrontation between the party and the opposition was mainly focused on the Adani issue.
In such a situation, it seems that if the ruling party had not made Rahul Gandhi’s statement an issue, then any of the above two issues would have been raised by the opposition, but ultimately the atmosphere would have been like this.
It is worrisome that the hope of a peaceful and healthy debate in Parliament seems to be on the wane.
If the issue of Rahul Gandhi’s alleged insult to Indian democracy from different fora in London is taken up, wouldn’t it have been better if the opposition had spoken about it after the ruling party’s allegation.
Whatever allegations, whether true or false, were made by Rahul Gandhi, its reasons would be discussed, he would be asked for details of the reason when according to him his mike was switched off. It would be investigated whether those complaints are baseless or some reality is behind it.
This would have created scope for improving the level of functioning in the Parliament.
But it seems that be it the ruling party or the opposition, no one is interested in getting to the root of these issues and addressing them.
If this situation continues, then the remaining period of the budget session will also become a victim of such noise.
Keep in mind that in this part of the session, the demands of Grant are to be discussed and the budget is also to be passed. Apart from this, there are 26 bills pending in Rajya Sabha and about 9 bills pending in Lok Sabha.
It would be really unfortunate if all these could not be discussed properly.
