Under attack from within and by the Executive, Parliament stands diminished

The Monsoon session of Parliament has been the ‘most productive’ by passing 25 Bills and Rajya Sabha passed 15 Bills in two days--without scrutiny and without any debate and without the opposition

Under attack from within and by the Executive, Parliament stands diminished
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AJ Prabal

The truncated Monsoon session of Parliament has been the shortest in 20 years. For the Rajya Sabha, it was the second shortest session since 1952. The session began on September 14 and ended on September 23. Both Houses had 10 sittings each. While the Rajya Sabha sat for four hours a day for 10 days, the Lok Sabha sat for over 52 hours by extending the session beyond the scheduled conclusion at 7 am, twice up to midnight.

At the end of this ‘historic’ monsoon session, both the presiding officers voiced their elation at the super-productive sessions. As many as 25 Bills were passed during this short, session, each of them actually taking an hour or so. Far-reaching legislations affecting 1,370 million Indians ‘approved’ with little or no scrutiny— the opposition boycotting the last few sessions in protest against the suspension of eight Rajya Sabha MPs and denial of ‘Division’ or actual voting by the Deputy Chairman.

Indeed, the Rajya Sabha was even more productive by approving 15 Bills in the last two days, each Bill taking up less than half an hour of discussion in a virtually empty House. Did someone say, Indian Democracy is dead, long live Indian democracy?

The monsoon session should have been held in June and continued till August. But it was delayed because of the Coronavirus Induced Disease (COVID) fears. The Constitution does not allow a gap of more than six months between two sessions of Parliament and hence it was imperative that the Houses met before the end of September. By holding the truncated session, which did away with Question Hour and cut the Zero Hour by half, the Constitutional requirement has been met.

These last six months have been cataclysmic for the country. Battling a slowing economy and growing unemployment in 2019, the crippling and harsh lockdown in March ran the informal economy to the ground. Even the organized sector took a body blow and 21 million salaried jobs were lost by August, according to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE). China altered the Line of Actual Control (LAC) and occupied, according to the Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, 38,000 square kilometres of Indian territory.

But the Prime Minister, who continued addressing digital rallies outside Parliament during the session, failed to speak in Parliament and explain what he meant by telling an All-Party meeting in June that not an inch of Indian territory had been lost. No explanation was given to Parliament on how 20 soldiers lost their lives on 15-16 June at Galwan Valley and why barring a nationalistic and rhetorical statement by the Raksha Mantri. Parliament was none the wiser about the economic impact of the Indian retaliation and the future of IndoChina trade.

The monsoon session also saw COVID deaths rise to 91,000 and COVID cases going up to 5.73 million. But barring a statement by the Health Minister who defended the Government and claimed to have saved 78 thousand deaths and prevented over two million cases, again the Parliament had neither the time nor the opportunity to discuss the Government’s mishandling of the pandemic and its effect.

Curiously, these figures were held out in Parliament even as the Government blandly claimed that no data was available on the number of jobs lost due to COVID or the number of migrants who died while walking back home or the number of farmers who had committed suicide, prompting Congress MP Shashi Tharoor say sarcastically that the Government had given a whole new meaning to NDA which clearly stood for NO DATA AVAILABLE.


Curiously, in a written reply to a question in Parliament, the Government did acknowledge that over 29,000 people had died in road accidents during the quarter April to June. This was when the lockdown was in force, vehicular traffic was negligible and when highways and streets were deserted.

While the monsoon session will be remembered for the emasculation of Parliament, murder of democracy and a session which was virtually given a miss by the Prime Minister, Indian Parliament has been dysfunctional for some time. Indeed, writing in October last year, Congress MP Mr. Tharoor commented on the monotonous predictability of parliamentary sessions.

“The Narendra Modi government will propose. The opposition will oppose. If matters come to a head and a vote is called, the government’s brute majority will dispose,” he wrote.

“The merits of the issue will matter little. There will be no reasoned attempts to persuade the other side; or rather, when such attempts are made by the well-meaning, they will prove futile, since persuasion, reflection and exchange are not the purpose of the exercise. Increasingly, parliamentary debates have become a ritual, the obligatory airing of opposing views, until the whip is cracked and MPs duly vote on party lines.”

The monsoon session will also be remembered for the Government’s reluctance to give the opposition any elbow room and its determination to overrule the opposition and parliamentary scrutiny. Even as the Government sought to convert 11 ordinances promulgated after March, 2020 into law and secure Parliament’s approval on them, it was in no mood to concede demands to send the Bills to Select Committees for studying them and recommend improvements.

Even on the three ordinances related to trade in agriculture produce, which sought to dismantle a 60-year old arrangement, the Government was not willing to delay the passage of the Bills for even a day, leave alone six months. This arrogance led to the ugly situation in the Rajya Sabha on Sunday, September 20, when Deputy Chairman Harivansh Narayan Singh disallowed ‘Division’, leading to pandemonium.

Arguably, if he had followed the rule book and allowed Division, opposition MP’s would not have rushed to the well of the House, flaunted the Rule Book at him and raised slogans. The Deputy Chairman switched off Rajya Sabha Television and went on to claim that he had been abused and physically threatened. A microphone was broken by an MP while another got up on a table and screamed at him. This led him to suspend eight opposition MP’s for the rest of the session and declare that the farm Bills had been passed by voice vote.

Derek O’Brien, one of the suspended MP’s, took to Twitter to deny that he had torn the Rule Book. In a video message he pointed out that the Rule Book stated that even if one Member of the House called for Division, the Chair was bound to concede it and conduct actual voting. Had the voting taken place, he claimed, it would have become clear that the Government did not have the numbers in the House and would have lost in the vote. That is why voting was not allowed and the Bills were declared to have been passed by ‘voice vote’.


“Deputy Chairman of the RS has been a very close personal friend of mine for long. Till July, 2017 he was a bitter critic of PM, until his party abandoned the grand alliance in Bihar. Since then he has become an unthinking rubberstamp in the important position he occupies. Very sad,” tweeted Congress MP Jairam Ramesh after the ruckus. He also pointed out that the Deputy Chairman had been ‘extraordinarily rude to Praful Patel, Sharad Pawar ji’s colleague’ as well as former Prime Minister H.D. Deve Gowda, who had been administered oath as member and was speaking on the farm bills.

Congress leader K.C. Venugopal said: “It is unfortunate that ministers are justifying what the deputy Chairperson did. In a parliamentary democracy, the government has the way — we agree — but the Opposition has its say.”

Congress MP Abhishek Manu Singhvi questioned the voice vote itself, underlining that there was no audio in the Lok Sabha — where several of the Rajya Sabha members were seated.

“The dictatorial attitude of the Chair in not wanting to get a sense of the House, which is the convention, to extend the session beyond the scheduled 1pm, led to bedlam & chaos,” tweeted Congress chief whip Jairam Ramesh, before adding, “ the whole world saw that the Chair was following the order of the Govt and not the other way around. The panic set in the Treasury Benches after the BJD and TRS asked the anti-Farmer Bills to be sent to the Select Committee.”

All parties including the BJP had apparently agreed to a four-hour discussion on the two farm Bills in the Rajya Sabha. This was unilaterally cut short by the Government’s floor managers by almost 45 minutes, which triggered the protest by the opposition in the House, he recalled.

In a video message, an emotional Derek O’Brien said: “Today, the right to seek a division was taken away from the Opposition... It’s like literally taking parliamentary democracy and shoving a knife into it… You don’t expect the Opposition to sit down and eat lollipops while this happens. So, we protested. Interestingly, the TRS and the BJD, which normally vote with the government, also wanted the bills to go to a Select Committee. So, were the government not sure of their numbers? If they were so sure of the numbers, they could have allowed us to have the vote.”

“Yes, there are rules that we should not be shooting inside the Rajya Sabha. But we won’t let you get away with it.... You want to suspend me, suspend me. We shot it... there are no rules left. Yes, the Opposition took videos.… You tried to rewrite the rules of Parliament... we took you on today, not for ourselves but for... Indian Parliament, farmers and the Opposition,” O’Brien added.

Over the last few years, Parliament has been systematically weakened. Union Budget has been approved without discussion. A number of Bills were classified as Money Bills to ensure that they were not stalled by the Rajya Sabha. The Lok Sabha has not elected a Deputy Speaker, traditionally a position held by the opposition, for over a year. Bills are no longer referred to Parliamentary Committees for scrutiny and far-reaching amendments have been carried out without taking states or the opposition in confidence.


Never has Parliament been attacked so relentlessly from within. The institution overcame the attack by terrorists in 2001. It is finding it difficult to counter the onslaught by the Executive from within.

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