Not by numbers alone

How will the nation remember the parliamentary debate on Gujarat? At the end of the discussion in the two Houses, are we clearer, or wiser, ...

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How will the nation remember the parliamentary debate on Gujarat? At the end of the discussion in the two Houses, are we clearer, or wiser, about the way ahead? The answers to both questions are depressingly clear.

The debate on one of the most crucial issues of our times, in the highest forum of the land, was completely overwhelmed by the scheduled bodycount at its end.

In the Lok Sabha, the government brandished its numerical superiority, smug and defiant to the last. It had the numbers, so what if it had lost the moral ground? In the Upper House, the numbers game spawned theatre of another kind. Here, bowing to the unfavourable arithmetic — the NDA is in a minority in the Rajya Sabha — the government went to farcical lengths to avoid the guaranteed defeat a vote would bring. It not only accepted the Opposition-propelled censure motion, it also claimed it has already taken steps under Article 355 of the Constitution.

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So what if the use of that particular provision implies an indictment of the Modi administration in Gujarat, and if the NDA has been strenuously defending the Modi government in every other forum? No, at the end of those talkathons, we the people are neither clearer nor wiser about how to dispel the gloom in Gujarat.

The debate on Gujarat has only reminded us of what we already knew before it began. The NDA government is unassailable, at least for now, in the Lok Sabha. The BJP’s allies may chafe and squirm as that party reverts to a hardline on Gujarat and other contentious issues, but they will not desert the ship in large enough numbers for it to sink. The Opposition’s upper hand in the Rajya Sabha was also underlined once more. But the debate has yielded nothing on the issue at its centre.

Amid the shows of strength, now by the government and then by the Opposition, Parliament could offer nothing that could reassure the people of Gujarat. There was little or no talk of the mechanisms through which relief and rehabilitation must be effected.

What must be done to ensure that the prime minister’s belated relief package, for instance, reaches the needy in all communities equally? Very little was heard on the need for confidence-building measures that would encourage the refugees still huddled in the relief camps to leave their tentative shelter and resume normal lives. The people’s representatives had nothing to say at all on the ways and means of institutionalising trust between the majority and minority communities in the longer term so that the madness does not overtake us again. There was no sober introspection on the principle and practice of secularism, the lengthening distance between the two.

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The nation feels cheated that its representatives diminished the tragedy of Gujarat in this way. At the end of it, another vital issue has passed Parliament by. The issues thrown up by Gujarat must now join the ever-lengthening list of pending business of the House to be taken up when and if its proceedings can transcend the numbers game. There is no reason to hope that it will happen in the near future.