Author: Editorial
Publication: The Free Press Journal
Date: July 23, 2003
URL: http://www.samachar.com/features/230703-editorial.html
They came, they shouted and went
home. But not before ensuring that they all got a full working day's pay
and perks. Our hon'ble MPs do believe in having a swell time at the cost
of us poor tax-payers, isn't it? Otherwise, instead of creating bedlam,
which is no more unprecedented, they would settle down to debate and discuss
the urgent business of the House, nay, of the people and help in creating
an orderly democracy. It has now become routine for Parliament to open
after each break with a `bang'. The Opposition seems to believe that unless
it generates a high-decibel racket inside the House it would not merit
the next day's headlines. The media as a whole, including this newspaper,
plays into the hands of the trouble-makers which invariably takes note
of them not for their brilliant exposition of the burning issues of the
day but for a very loud display of lung power. The louder you shout, the
better parliamentarian you are seems to have become the mantra for our
MPs. Thus it was that on the first two days of the monsoon session of parliament,
the opposition forced the presiding officers to adjourn the two houses
without enacting any business.
The issue they had picked up to
create the shindy over this time was the alleged governmental interference
in the working of the CBI. It was alleged that the Prime Minister's office
had got the premiere investigative agency to drop the conspiracy charge
against three leading members of the BJP, including L. K. Advani. It was
the Opposition case that the Deputy Prime Minister, HRD Minister Murli
Manohar Joshi and the Madhya Pradesh BJP leader, Uma Bharati, were not
charged under Section 120-B (conspiracy) of the IPC for their alleged role
in the Babri Masjid demolition case under political pressure. The Government
insisted that the CBI at no stage had leveled the charge under Section
120-B against the three and, therefore, there was no question of it dropping
it now or at any stage earlier. But the Opposition would have none of it
and, as if following a pre-written script, it was hell-bent on stalling
the regular business of the House so that it could extract maximum propaganda
mileage.
But like all propaganda the one
over the demolition of the Babri Masjid too is a double-edged weapon. Sanjay
Nirupam, the stormy petrel of the Shiv Sena, had a point when he chided
the Congress members in the Rajya Sabha for being obsessed with Advani
and his alleged role in the demolition of the disputed structure in Ayodhya
while being wholly unmindful of the morning's headlines which reported
that the Paksponsored terrorists had gunned down at least five pilgrims
to the Vaishno Devi shrine in Jammu and left three dozen others seriously
wounded. It was Nirupam's belief that the Opposition parties, notably the
Congress and the Samajwadi Party, were targeting Advani and Co. solely
with the objective of mollycoddling the sizeable Muslim vote. The votaries
of the Ram temple at the disputed site in Ayodhya are bound to look askance
at the Opposition stance and come to the conclusion that the party is unready
to stop playing the pernicious minority card. Clearly, if the Congress
Party was concerned about upholding the rule of law it would not have dropped
a number of cases against its own members while in power. Upholding judicial
verdicts has never been the strong suit of the Congress Party. Remember
Mrs Gandhi had clamped the emergency and put lakhs of people in jail only
in order not to implement the Allahabad high court verdict against her.
And remember too how the Congress
Party led first by Rajiv Gandhi and now by his widow has gone to great
lengths to frustrate the Bofors probe; it allowed that Italian wheelerdealer
to slip away just in the nick of time when the CBI got hold of the clinching
evidence nailing him as a conduit for the commission in the howitzer deal.
In fact, it redounds to the credit of the NDA Government that it has scrupulously
avoided interfering with the due process of law in the Babri Masjid case.
Otherwise, the CBI would not have continued with its investigations and,
what was more, would not have filed charges against the three leading lights
of the BJP in a court of law. As for the conspiracy charge under Section
120-B, it was not for Parliament to determine as to what particular section
of the IPC ought to be applied against the accused in a particular case;
that task was best left to the investigative agencies and the courts. In
this case, it was the relevant court in Lucknow which had dropped the charge
against the three on a technicality and successive administrations in UP,
including those run by the Congress Party, had failed to rectify the lacunae.
Parliament will set a wrong precedent if it is allowed to determine the
IPC sections under which a particular accused should be charged.
