Rahul Gandhi’s speech only reprised the range of well-worn themes of his election campaign: From the BJP’s alleged peddling of hate and fear to the debilitating effect of demonetisation on jobs and the informal economy.
The election is over and for the country to move forward, a reconstituted government and a rearranged Opposition need to talk to each other in Parliament — it’s just that India’s new government and new Opposition don’t seem to be in a hurry to acknowledge this. Listening to the Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi in Lok Sabha Monday, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the same House the next day — speaking on the motion of thanks to the President’s address — the sense was as dispiriting as it was inescapable. Both spoke as if the campaign had not yet ended, and in fact, had begun all over again after a break.
The PM and LoP also appeared to inhabit the same make-believe — that the people had not urged humility on both sides, that the mandate had not taken down the BJP-led government by more than a notch, and that it had not withheld by a bigger margin a majority from the INDIA bloc. If the Congress-led Opposition is unwise and plain wrong in its reading of the verdict as an outright victory for itself and decisive defeat for the BJP, the BJP’s emphasis on stability and continuity, and its continuing disdain for its political opponent, is self-serving and disconnected from the responsibility cast on it for change.
Having said that, the government appears to be too thin-skinned. While Congress’s exultation is jarring, it is possible to explain it as a cathartic outpouring after a decade of what had begun to seem like its unchecked decline.
Gandhi’s speech only reprised the range of well-worn themes of his election campaign: From the BJP’s alleged peddling of hate and fear to the debilitating effect of demonetisation on jobs and the informal economy. His show-and-tell with pictures of gods — a day after waving the Constitution — was jarring and an abdication of subtlety if not a breakdown of speech.
But those shortcomings, and the unbecoming sloganeering during the PM’s speech, were more than matched by the belligerence and narrow-spiritedness of those who spoke for a government-in-denial. The expunging of remarks made by Gandhi, and exhortations by the Treasury benches to the Speaker to act against the Opposition, show that the government is lapsing into its winner-take-all playbook and turning its back on the new political reality.
The fact is that it confronts a re-energised political opponent and its erstwhile dominance is now subject to checks and balances. Seeking to infantilise the Rahul-Congress — as the PM did — by using terms like “balak buddhi (childish)”, or labelling it as anti-Hindu, and anti-Dalit, or a “parjeevi” (parasite on its allies), is so pre-June 4. It’s so last government.
The first face-off in the House is an opportunity missed by both sides, but the term of the new government, and the new Opposition, has only just begun. Going forward, the ruling BJP must resolve to not play, by turn, vindictive aggressor and hapless victim of a sinister “eco-system” anymore. Let it learn to talk to a stronger Opposition, and listen to its voice, sometimes raucous though it may be. And let the Opposition also step back from the edge and use the political spaces that Verdict 2024 has opened up for it, judiciously and creatively. The points have been counted — they don’t need daily scoring.
