The Bihar factor: Why BJP is fine with monsoon session being a total washout

The Congress lacks the moral authority to seek action against corruption. The BJP lacks the moral propriety to act on its election promises. The casualty of this immoral politics will be the monsoon session.

The session is headed for a washout. The BJP has decided to provide the umbrella of its Lok Sabha majority to Sushma Swaraj, Vasundhara Raje and Shivraj Singh Chouhan. The Opposition, lead by the Congress, has threatened to block all business with the noise of its Rajya Sabha majority. Unless one of them back downs, the Mexican standoff will continue. And Parliament will be held hostage at gunpoint.

The Congress, like all opposition parties, has nothing to lose if the Parliament is disrupted. In Indian Parliament, constructive opposition is an oxymoron since whoever is in opposition believes in not letting the government function. This often leads to the irony of the Opposition scuttling the very bills it had introduced while in government.

To keep the tradition of destructive opposition alive, it is unlikely the Congress will make a compromise that allows the Narendra Modi government to do anything worthwhile, like passing the GST Bill, which was once high on the UPA agenda. According to NDTV, the government has finalised 35 items of business for the monsoon session, which included nine bills pending in the Rajya Sabha and four pending in Lok Sabha, besides the introduction of 11 new bills. It will be a miracle if even a small percentage of the business is transacted.

In the last Lok Sabha, an entire session was washed out because of the government-opposition stand-off on the 2G scam. Speaking to CNN-IBN in February 2014, Arun Jaitley, who was the then Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, had said, “…But parliament being used as a forum in more than one ways to expose the weaknesses of the government, I think, is a positive development, and to that extent I think this parliament has done well.” Jaitley had further argued that “the responsibility of restoring sanity and peace in the House belongs to the ruling party and if the ruling party can’t put its own house in order…”

By Jaitley’s logic, it woule be incumbent on his government to ensure sanity and peace in the Monsoon session. But the BJP appears in no mood to back down. As PM Modi indicated in his speech in Jammu past week, this time there will be a “muqabala” in Parliament.

And this is how the “muqabala” will unfold.

On Sushma Swaraj, the Congress will talk of impropriety and seek her resignation as a pre-requsite for Parliament to function. The BJP will claim Lalit Modi was helped on “humanitarian grounds” and the foreign minister had done nothing illegal or immoral. It will then ask the Congress why it had failed to act against Lalit Modi during its tenure.

Result: Congress 0; BJP 0.

On Vasundhara Raje, the Congress will talk of a quid-pro-quo on her son’s deals with Lalit Modi in return for her support for his immigration application to British authorities. In return, the BJP will talk about Robert Vadra’s deals and Lalit Modi’s tweets on his alleged meeting with Congress leaders.

Both parties will expose the “Modi cronies” in each other’s huts.

Result: Congress 0; BJP 0.

On Shivraj Singh Chouhan, the BJP will point out that it has accepted the Opposition demand for a CBI probe. It will then argue that the Vyapam scam is much older than Chouhan’s government. It will counter the Congress charge of Chouhan’s culpability by pointing fingers at allegations of corruption against the Himachal Pradesh Chief Minister Virbhadra Singh.

Again, the two rivals will achieve nothing excepting proving that in the hamam of Indian politics, everybody is nude.

When it comes to corruption, Indian politicians believe in a philosophy inspired by Amitabh Bachchan in Deewar: They will sign on the resignation letter only if someone first gets the signature of all the people who committed a crime before them. And since every cupboard is full of scams, the Indian voter is condemned to watch this ‘pehle aap, pehle aap’ tamasha.

So, once the monsoon session turns into another round of characteristic mud slinging, nothing concrete will come out.

Available evidence suggests the BJP is already looking beyond the monsoon session. It has already curtailed it to three weeks, instead of the usual four so that the Opposition doesn’t get too much time to wage its war on the government. The government has also put the contentious Land Acquisition Bill on the backburner so that the Opposition doesn’t get to fight an ideological battle and the brouhaha in Parliament remains limited to personal allegations.

The BJP strategy is simple: Ride out the storm, counter charges with a vociferous counter-attack and don’t give the Opposition the privilege of a long session and, ergo, more coverage.

Soon, the country’s focus will shift to elections in Bihar. If the BJP wins it, the government can always claim that it has come back with a clean-chit from voters and the Opposition charges have been rejected by the ultimate jury in a democracy: the electorate.

The fate of Chief Ministers of Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh and the foreign minister of India will, ironically, be decided by voters in far away Bihar.