Rahul, Congress may have won war of monsoon session but tide's turning against them

For the Congress it was just another day of the monsoon session of Parliament. Most of the party’s 44 MPs in the Lok Sabha were in the well of the house shouting slogans and waving placards. In the Rajya Sabha they shouted to drown out Finance Minister Arun Jaitley’s accusations that they were against the economic progress of the country by blocking the GST bill. But despite stalling all legislation in both houses of Parliament, the Congress ended the day with more egg on its face than it would have liked. Speaker Sumitra Mahajan attempted to indulge in some MP shaming by getting Lok Sabha TV to air footage of legislators who were standing in the well of the house waving placards in her face, despite her pleas not to. “Show them on TV. I am requesting the Lok Sabha TV. This is not the way. I won’t adjourn the House… Let people see what kind of behaviour they are showing. Let whole of India watch. 40 people are hijacking the rights of 440 members.This is murder of democracy. This is not democracy. 440 members want to talk and 40-50 members are not letting them. Let people know how irresponsible they are. The Chair has no wish of being seen on the TV. Let people watch them,” she said . [caption id=“attachment_2389056” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] PTI image[/caption] It was a pointed barb given that Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi and Sonia had earlier complained that their protests were not being shown on the channel. As Indian Express reported , under the guidelines issues to the channel, it isn’t supposed to show protests if the Speaker is in the chair and should remain focussed on occupants of the chair. After Mahajan’s instruction, the channel began broadcasting the protest in all its glory. Even the support and sympathy it had gained from other parties when 25 of its MPs were suspended by the Speaker, appears to have eroded. One-time ally Mulayam Singh had broken ranks for his own agenda in the Lok Sabha and seemed to be in support of debating legislation so that it could passed. He even earned praise from Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in the BJP’s parliamentary party meet. So it wasn;t a surprise that he was booed by the Congress when  he stood up in Parliament to demand caste data. Regional parties like the BJD and AIADMK also appeared less inclined to back the Congress. In Parliament, BJD MP Bhratruhari Mahtab took on the Congress accusing them of a ‘manifestation of fascism’. “Last century had seen a streak of fascism….Now what is being seen is manifestation of fascism inside the House, Mahtab said. Then Finance Minister Arun Jaitley came out of Parliament. And he had nothing kind to say about the Gandhi family. “The real purpose is that they want to stall  the growth of the country and that is why session after session, they are using one pretext or the other to stall it. That is why they are using the pretext of External Affairs Minister. The Congress party does not want the economy to grow. They must candidly say so…They don’t need any pretext,” he said.   “It is clear that its two leaders have taken their 2014 defeat very badly. And therefore they are unable to accept the fact that anybody outside the Gandhi family can also rule this country,” he said. It’s not just in Parliament and on social media that the Congress is on a backfoot. Even a chunk of India Inc has now gotten into the act and asked Parliament to function. A petition on change.org put up by the Confederation of Indian Industry seeking that Parliament be allowed to function has been gathering steam and now has over 16,000 signatures. And this is including industry stalwarts like ex-Infosys CEO Kris Gopalakrishnan, Godrej group chief Adi Godrej, Biocon chairperson Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Bajaj Auto chairperson Rahul Bajaj among others. While the petition urges parties to get along and let Parliament function, the Congress can be understandably aggrieved about not having received similar support when it had faced a similar logjam when it was in power and faced similar protests in Parliament. However, the petition is perhaps  a sign of just how much the tide has turned against the party despite its claims of having raised the Lalit Modi and Vyapam scam issues in the interest of the government. For the Congress, the scandals involving Sushma Swaraj, Vasundhara Raje and Shivraj Singh Chouhan were opportunities that allowed them to pay back the BJP in the same coin when it came to disrupting Parliament. But despite the BJP making it sound like they would have passed legislation like the Land Acquisition, GST and other crucial legislation on the anvil, as Firstpost’s R Jagannathan had pointed out earlier, there were many kinks that needed to be resolved and the legislation were unlikely to be passed anyway. However, as the session draws to a close, what is evident is that the Congress has been bleeding support and is back to where it was when the session began: isolated in its protest. The switching of sides by other opposition parties, the signature campaign, a Land Acquisition Bill that has all the amendments they wanted and stinging rhetoric from the BJP may mean the Congress may be on weaker ground when Parliament re-convenes for the winter session around November. If the Congress-backed alliance manages to win in Bihar then the party might just find a new lease of life. Rahul Gandhi may have emerged victorious after the battle of the monsoon session, but then winter is still coming.