You are reading this on the concluding day of the Winter Session of Parliament. Thoughts on the 21-day session.
Five proper nouns dominated: Common nouns like price rise, inflation, federalism, and unemployment were expected to dominate the debates in this session. But instead, only these proper nouns made headlines for all the right/wrong reasons: George Soros, Gautam Adani, and Jawaharlal Nehru.
In the concluding days of the session, it was B R Ambedkar and Home Minister Amit Shah who were trending. This columnist was sitting only a few seats away, on the same row, from where the Home Minister was delivering his speech. Here is what he said (translation): “It has become fashionable, Ambedkar, Ambedkar, Ambedkar, Ambedkar, Ambedkar… If you had taken God’s name so many times, you would have gone to heaven for seven lives”. The Leader of the Opposition, sitting on this columnist’s right, immediately responded (his intervention was not picked up on the microphone, nor was the camera on Mallikarjun Kharge who said) “Mr Home Minister, by what you just said it seems you have a big problem with Ambedkar. Why?”
Who spoke the most: As of December 18, Rajya Sabha ran for a total of 43 hours. Of this, Bills were discussed for 10 hours. The debate on the Constitution lasted for 17 and a half hours. Of the remaining 15-and-a-half hours, who spoke for four-and-a-half hours, or nearly 30 per cent of the remaining time? It was the Rajya Sabha Chairman and Vice President. Did Jagdeep Dhankar set a new record in Parliament?
Sparkling debut: Six MPs were sworn in earlier this week. Sana Sathish Babu (TDP), Masthan Rao Yadav Beedha (TDP), Ryaga Krishnaiah (BJP), Rekha Sharma (BJP), Sujeet Kumar (BJP), and Ritabrata Banerjee (AITC). Ritabrata even got the opportunity to speak on the Constitution the day after he was sworn in. While his party colleagues took each word of the Preamble as the theme for their speech, he spoke on Rabindranath Tagore and read out four stanzas from Tagore’s ‘Morning Song of India’. The first stanza of that poem was adopted by the Constituent Assembly as our national anthem. Ritabrata’s jugalbandi of Bengali and English gave us goosebumps.
Marathon speeches: During the debate titled ‘Glorious Journey of 75 Years of the Constitution of India’, someone murmured: “Listening to some of the speeches from the Treasury benches, was wondering whether we are discussing 75 years of the Constitution or 49 years of the Emergency!” A few members spoke for over one hour. Messrs Modi, Shah, Rajnath Singh, Kiren Rijiju, J P Nadda, and Nirmala Sitharaman. Mallikarjun Kharge was the only Opposition MP to speak for more than an hour.
My favourite speech by a BJP MP: In the government’s previous term, Bhupendra Yadav used to be the Minister of Environment, Forest and Climate Change as well as Labour and Employment. Since June 2024, the Labour and Employment portfolio has been given to someone else. Enjoyed listening to him as he referred to a research paper by the University of Chicago that analysed life spans of constitutions around the world. Quoting from the paper, the Minister shared that 50 per cent of Constitutions are likely to be dead by age 80 and only 19 per cent survive until age 50. Seven per cent do not even make it to their second birthday. Intriguing.
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Best birthday party: Several parties are hosted by MPs during a session of Parliament. It was Sharad (Uncle) Pawar’s 84th birthday on December 12. His daughter, Lok Sabha MP Supriya Sule, organised a cosy birthday dinner. The celebration was not only for her father, but also for Pratibha Pawar, her mother, whose birthday was the next day. Among the guests in attendance were Telangana Chief Minister (CM) Revanth Reddy, former Uttar Pradesh CM Akhilesh Yadav along with spouse MP Dimple Yadav, former Jammu and Kashmir CM Farooq Abdullah, and MPs Jaya Bachchan, Saugata Roy, and Abhishek Manu Singhvi. Wish more octogenarians had such a positive mindset.
An excerpt from my speech on the Constitution: The Constitution is more than a book in a library. It is a living, breathing document on the streets of India. We are a week away from Christmas. There is a Jewish bakery in Kolkata that makes delicious Christmas cake. All the 300 workers in that Jewish bakery belong to one community. They are all Muslims. And about a week before Christmas, you see long queues outside the bakery. If you go and ask the people standing in those queues, they will tell you their names: “Bhaskar, Reema, Arun”. It does not matter. They are all Indians. Cake for a Christian festival, made by Muslim bakers, and enthusiastically purchased by Hindu buyers. Come, celebrate Christmas in Bengal next week at the Kolkata Christmas Festival. Come again at the end of March to line up on Red Road and watch the Eid prayers. And, mark the date, April 30, 2025. Come to Digha to see the beautiful new Jagannath Temple.
The writer is MP and leader, All India Trinamool Congress Parliamentary Party (Rajya Sabha). Additional research: Ayashman Dey, Varnika Mishra
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