THE conduct of the Opposition in Parliament -- Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha -- must be described as sheer obstinacy. The Opposition tried to harass Prime Minister Mr. Narendra Modi not just in Lok Sabha during his 137-minute speech, but also carried on with the practice in Rajya Sabha for long time before staging a walk-out on a flimsy ground. Right at the beginning of the third term of the Modi Government, the Opposition has declared its obstructionist intentions -- as if fully oblivious to the fact that such tactics would not now work particularly after the nation has woken up to the dirty tactics and would not allow those to succeed. There is no doubt that such tactics would bring only frustration to the Opposition at all levels -- politically and electorally. In Rajya Sabha, the Opposition demand was not just strange but actually funny (since using any other word for such a conduct may invite trouble). It asked for an allowance to the Leader of Opposition (LoP) to interject into the speech of the Prime Minister as a culmination to the debate on Motion of Thanks to The President. Such strange demand, of course, could not be fulfilled since rules did not permit that. But the rejection of the demand by the presiding officer did not go well with the Opposition whose members kept raising slogans ‘LoP-LoP-LoP-LoP ...’ during the Prime Minister’s address.

 

And after about forty minutes of slogan-shouting, the Opposition staged a walk-out while the Prime Minister continued with his address. But then, as the Opposition staged a walk-out, Rajya Sabha Chairman Mr. Jagdeep Dhankhar shared his sense of disturbed emotion with the House. He said, in effect, that the Opposition did not show disrespect just to him or the House but to the Constitution of India and the dignity of the nation. With his voice choking with emotion, Mr. Dhankhar added that the Opposition was only hurting the spirit of democracy and the culture of bipartisan dialogue of Parliament. The Chairman expected the Opposition to learn right lessons from the current situation and come up with proper conduct on the floor of the House. Mr. Narendra Modi also made clear references to the Opposition’s conduct and stressed that it does not have the courage to listen to voice or reason and details of fact about the allegations its members have made in the House or outside it. There is no need to make any fresh comment on the detailed content of the Prime Minister’s speech at this point. For, what is needed now is a reiteration of our earlier insistence that a strict action must be taken against the unruly Opposition in both Houses of Parliament. It was actually surprising that the presiding officers were rather too tame in handling the unruly conduct of the Opposition in both the Houses.

 

They should have acted tougher and gone ahead taking action under appropriate rules. It was also equally surprising that the Members on the Government benches, too, chose to remain rather subdued -- instead of blasting the Opposition by standing up in unison and shouting the Opposition down. True, the members on the Government benches did stand up offering quick responses to the falsehood in the speeches by Opposition Members. Yet, they were not appropriately aggressive. In fact, even Mr. Narendra Modi could have been more aggressive -- which he refrained from being (for his own reasons). The content of his addresses in Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha was strong and no-nonsense. But his manner could have been more ballistic -- given the method and manner of the Opposition. This is what the nation has felt in the last 3-4 days after watching the proceedings in the two Houses of Parliament at the start of the Modi Government’s third term.