On the spot
Tavleen Singh
On one of the days last week when Parliament was suspended yet again because the Bharatiya Janata Party sent its members into the well of the house for another round of tumult and hullabaloo I conducted a small poll on Twitter. I tweeted that, ‘Indian taxpayers lose Rs 2 crores a day when Parliament doesn’t work. Should MPs not compensate us for the loss they cause?’ The response was overwhelming. My tweet was retweeted nearly 200 times and there was general agreement among my followers that the BJP was making a big mistake by not allowing a debate on the CAG’s latest reports. The BJP itself seemed to notice, a little too late perhaps, that ordinary Indians would prefer a debate in parliament rather than street fighting and slogans and so sent some its heavy hitters out to defend the party’s tactics.
Arun Jaitley and Sushma Swaraj addressed a press conference at party headquarters in Delhi which became more famous for Ms Swaraj’s crude charge about the Congress Party having made ‘mota maal’ (a big killing) out of coal blocks being given to private companies. An unwise remark since it is becoming increasingly obvious that many of these blocks were given on the recommendation of BJP chief ministers who opposed the idea of auctioning them. And, even more unwise if you keep in mind Ms Swaraj’s own very cozy relations with the infamous Reddy brothers of Bellary. The BJP’s senior leaders seemed not to have given much thought to strategy because it fielded Yashwant Sinha, a former Finance Minister, to write an article in an English newspaper that defended the blocking of Parliament on the grounds that the Congress Party had often done the same sort of thing when Atal Behari Vajpayee was prime minister.
Had they given more thought to their political strategy they would have noticed how much the times have changed since then. Ten years ago social media sites did not exist and the Internet was in such a nascent stage that only a handful of Indians were even aware of it. In 2003, the last year of the Vajpayee government, there were 22,500,000 Internet users in India or 2.1% of the population. Today there are more than 100,000,000 Indians who regularly use the worldwide web and this is one reason why it was so easy to use false videos from social networking sites to cause the recent flight of northeastern Indians from cities like Mumbai and Bangalore. Unfortunately, it is only the bad side of the internet that our political leaders have discovered while citizens have discovered its immense powers for good and evil. When our elected representatives behave like street fighters instead of responsible politicians inside the houses of Parliament they seem not to remember that it takes seconds for the news to go viral across continents.
If the BJP’s myopic leaders had realized this they may have adopted a more effective strategy of taking the government to task over the latest CAG reports. Instead of the limited debate we have witnessed every day on all our news channels we would have seen a real debate inside Parliament that may have enlightened us about exactly which private companies were given coal blocks to exploit and what exactly happened as a consequence. Why did most of them remain unexploited? If they were given at cheap rates to steel and power companies was this benefit passed on to consumers? What have been the benefits of this privatization if any?
These are important questions because they would have enabled us to understand the government’s reasons for privatization. For example it is because there has been more noise than debate over the 2G scandal that most Indians remain unaware of the benefits of A. Raja’s alleged crony capitalism. There is little doubt that he handed out licenses to some of his friends but there is also little doubt that 800 million Indians would not have owned cell phones if an auction of airwaves had doubled or even tripled prices.
In the case of coal blocks privatization is a valid policy because nationalization of coal production in the seventies caused such a mess that India is one of the largest importers of coal despite having vast reserves of its own. The question that needs to be asked is whether the government privatized mines with a clear strategy in place or in a haphazard way? The question that immediately follows is whether the people of India benefited from this privatization? These are the sort of questions that our opposition parties should have been asking in Parliament instead of ranting and raving against unexplained policies in television studios.
Since there has been noise and fury instead of reasoned debate the Prime Minister has got away with an anodyne statement and a second rate line of Urdu verse. By means of this line of verse he said his silence was worth a thousand responses because it protected the honour of many. What exactly does this mean? If there were private companies who were wrongfully given control of coalmines then they must be identified as must those officials who may have benefited from this. These are facts that can only come out if there is a full debate in Parliament. If the Prime Minister is correct when he says that the CAG has spoken of losses in his report that are not in fact real then it is just as important that this be exposed so that the government’s main auditor ensures that he is more careful next time.
Meanwhile, if the BJP’s senior leaders were more aware of how much technology has changed the lives of ordinary Indians they may have come up with a strategy that took into account 100,000,000 Indian Internet users and more than twice that number who watch their antics in Parliament on television. This could have helped them come out looking better than they have out of this whole unfortunate imbroglio. When the houses of Parliament are used for shouting slogans and hurling abuse what is undermined is the most important institution of parliamentary democracy and the consequences of this can never be good either for the country or for the people elected to serve in the highest law-making body in the land. As things stand it is easy to forget that Parliament is a place where laws are supposed to be made and not an arena for people who have more faith in street fighting than in debate.
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