Off with their heads?

NEW DELHI: Three Congress MPs were suspended from the Lok Sabha on Thursday for the remainder of the Winter session for unruly behaviour, taking the total number of members of the lower House against whom such action has been taken to 100.

The total number of suspensions in the two Houses of Parliament now stands at an unprecedented 146, including 46 members of the Rajya Sabha.

The Opposition MPs were suspended on account of disrupting the House proceedings while demanding a statement from Home Minister Amit Shah on the security breach that occurred on December 13.

This is the highest number of MPs suspended in a single session in the history of the Parliament in recent memory.

The last time so many MPs were suspended from the Lok Sabha was during the Eighth Lok Sabha on March 15, 1989, during Rajiv Gandhi’s prime ministership, when 63 MPs were shown the door. At that time, the entire Opposition was suspended for demanding that the government discuss the Thakkar Commission report pertaining to the assassination of Indira Gandhi. Back then, the leader of the Janata Dal had accused the ruling dispensation of acting in a brazen fashion.

One of the takeaways of this episode is how the Parliament has now become the dais for full-fledged combat. There is barely any floor management or negotiations between leaders of the ruling dispensation and the Opposition members.

What experts believe is that the notion of suspensions should ideally be the last resort in any incidence of disruption of the House. Instead, summary boot-outs seem to have become the norm.

Remember how in March this year, the Opposition’s demands for immediate deliberation on the Adani scam were bulldozed into submission by the Treasury benches, who instead demanded an apology from Rahul Gandhi.

Political observers remark that there is a pattern to the way the ruling party responds to critical national issues — by shunning the Parliament and shirking accountability. A case in point is how the government refused to respond to the ethnic strife in Manipur when the constitutional machinery crumbled in the border state and many lives were lost. We still do not have the Union Government’s assessment of the events in Manipur and how it plans to restore normalcy in the region.

Ironically, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Defence Minister Rajnath Singh were categoric in mentioning before the start of the current session of the Parliament that the government was open to discussing all issues.

For a problem as contentious and critical as the security breach in the Parliament, what we needed was serious, apolitical brainstorming and deliberations.

Instead what we have transpiring both within the Parliament and outside, are travesties like mimicries, browbeating and plain old repression-fashioned silencing.

Undoubtedly, the suspension of Opposition MPs en masse is unfortunate. But, it must be pointed out that the lexicon employed by the Opposition to brand this development — ‘murder of democracy’ might not resonate with the vast majority of Indians.

The reason is the lack of unity in the bloc which became quite evident during the recent Assembly elections and its aftermath.

In the absence of an organic sense of cohesion that could unite the Opposition, on the basis of common policies that place the welfare of the ordinary citizen at its core, the warning regarding the erosion of democratic values would fall on flat ears, even if it happens to be the ground reality.