Opposition INDIA bloc’s MPs protesting at Parliament premises. (Photo: Congress/ X)
Dear Express Reader
The first full session of Parliament in the Narendra Modi government’s third term, which begins tomorrow, will see the passing of the Union Budget. It will also provide a whiff of an answer to a question: Can the Opposition use its bolstered presence in the House to make its voice heard — to compel a government that wants to pretend it is business-as-usual to acknowledge the change? And more importantly, to begin working on a political alternative that may not have been the cause of the mandate but can be its welcome effect?
Though parliamentary processes and procedures defer to the government more than they give space to the Opposition, for instance in the unequal allocation of time to both, Parliament is a much more critical showcase for an Opposition with a new-found confidence.
The government, after all, has many resources and platforms for communicating its message — so far the BJP has sought to propagate a make-believe sameness when it is not congratulating itself for a “historic” third term and blaming the Opposition for underplaying its victory by peddling “fake narratives”. A reinvigorated Opposition, on the other hand, will need to be inventive and imaginative in seizing the chance to tell its story. It will also need to resist at least two temptations.
The temptation will be strong for it to use the parliamentary moment only to underline the downsizing of Narendra Modi, whose narrative of his own inevitability stands punctured by a verdict that withheld a majority from his party after a campaign fought in his name. This is what the Opposition did in its last parliamentary outing, forcing Modi to speak above the constant sloganeering in Lok Sabha and in Rajya Sabha, walking out while he was speaking.
There is a sense in which, for the Opposition, this could be seen as an effective strategy — the PM who painted himself as rising above the fray even as his government and its agencies targeted its political opponents selectively and disproportionately, is now seen to be standing on a crowded ground, at eye level with those who feel they owe him no deference and who have been given a leg-up by the same mandate that denied him a clear majority.
The other temptation for the Opposition will be to over-read the verdict as a validation of its apocalyptic framing of democracy-in-danger and, as a consequence, to keep raising the pitch in Parliament.
But both strategies — of turning on a PM who targeted them, and of shouting down the government — will lead to the Opposition wasting a precious opportunity to work on its own coherence and jointness on major national issues and use Parliament to draw attention to it.
The fact is that not just the BJP, even the Opposition will be deluded if it convinces itself that it has won. This election verdict is made of its many parts, that must be pieced together state by state, which behaved differently. It is also a verdict that saw the BJP plunge by 63 seats with a decline of less than 0.7 per cent in its national vote share from 2019, and Congress raise its vote share by only 1.7 per cent to nearly double its tally of seats from 52 to 99. What this means is that the work of the Opposition is not yet done. It may, in fact, have only just begun.
But dialling down the rhetoric and getting down to work under the people’s gaze in Parliament will be easier said than done for more reasons than the Opposition’s over-reading of the verdict or because its grievance and anger accumulated over a decade is still not spent. It will be a challenge, also, because of the general fading of the institution of Parliament. This process has certainly been accelerated in the Modi years, but it has been going on over several decades.
Parliament is an inset in a larger story of dimming idealism and weakening commitment to the rules of the game which has had a corrosive effect on a host of public institutions. Moreover, in the social media age, when arenas are proliferating from which politics as performance vies for the citizen’s attention, Parliament is also looking, more and more, like an overtaken institution. Who’s going to wait, then, for the back and forth in Parliament to have their political fill? And does anyone miss Parliament anymore when it shuts down?
And yet, an Opposition in search of its larger role can ill afford to ignore Parliament. Even at its weakest, Parliament offers the most spacious and hospitable setting for people’s representatives to articulate large alternatives and ideas and hold power to account. The new Opposition must begin its innings by taking its House-work more seriously.
Till next week,
Vandita
