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The House wins

The House wins

Author: Editorial
Publication: The Indian Express
Date: August 18, 2011
URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/the-house-wins/833368/

Anna Hazare's brief detention and the calculations around it may have made sense at the time for the government, but it certainly cost them in Parliament. Even as the prime minister took charge of his "painful duty to report" on the events of the day before and the government's own rationale, opposition leaders tore into that logic. It was a demonstration of Parliament at its incisive best, with some tough adversarial questioning as well as genuine understanding of the core issues at stake.

The PM explained that his government valued the right to protest, but that right is hedged by certain conditions imposed by those responsible for law and order, which Hazare and his supporters had refused to accept. He drew the House's attention to the crux of the issue - while united on the larger need to fight corruption and also on the urgency of the Lokpal bill, the question is, "who drafts the law and who makes the law?" He spoke about the misconceptions of Hazare's campaign, in trying to impose its will on elected representatives, and appealed to the House to preserve the place of the government's, and Parliament's, processes.

That speech was deftly unravelled by opposition leaders - the BJP's Arun Jaitley called the entire exercise a failure of statecraft, saying what should have been handled by imaginative politics had now been reduced to a quibble over the penal code, that the immediate question was not the primacy of Parliament but the expression of legitimate dissent. While making it clear the BJP did not support Hazare's charter, he spoke of the need for political artfulness to deal with it, rather than the limited lens of law and order, or political leadership "hiding behind men in uniform". Sushma Swaraj also ripped into the government, asking why the matter was now being cast as Hazare's problem with Parliament at large, when the opposition was conspicuously left out of the joint drafting committee earlier. Others like Lalu Prasad spoke, cheered on by MPs across party lines, of how nobody could dictate to Parliament, and of the serious issues at stake with the Anna Hazare movement. The opposition banded together as equal members to calmly discuss the dangers in street action and defend the House, as well as grill the government on its recent decision-making. Unlike shallow studio chatter or the absolutism of Hazare's supporters, this Parliament debate gave us a glimpse of deliberative democracy at its best.


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