The Nation: Parliament; Alone Together

India Today, January 4, 1999
Dec 28, 1998

PARLIAMENT
Alone Together

The floor coordination by the BJP and the Congress in the House gave the two parties time to rein opponents within and outside.

The winter session would have been a fiasco for the government but for the support of the Congress By Harish Gupta

When the three-week-long winter session of Parliament began on November 30 the popular perception was that the Congress, fresh from its victory in the assembly elections, would maul the BJP. The truth, however, was quite different.

The two parties came to the brink of giving a chance to bi-partisan politics by almost enacting two pro-reform legislations on insurance and patents. The camaraderie between the treasury and the main opposition benches was such that after one particularly amiable sitting, Sharad Pawar, the leader of the Opposition emerged from the House to tell newsmen what he thought of the goings on. "I think instead of Parliamentary affairs, we are witnessing a different kind of affair here." True, there was no shortage of chaos that exposed the poor floor management abilities of the A.B. Vajpayee Government. And but for the cooperation from the main Opposition, the Government may not have succeeded in getting any listed business transacted.

For the record, the Lok Sabha sat for 18 days. The records office more precisely states that it met for 98 hours and 52 minutes during which 17 bills were introduced, 14 of them passed. The pandemonium that is associated with Parliament was mostly conspicuous by its absence, save a handful of occasions when the raucous members of Mulayam Singh Yadav's Rashtriya Loktantrik Morcha descended to the well of the House to register their protest and perhaps presence.

The bonhomie between the BJP and the Congress suited both sides. If it enabled Vajpayee to deal firmly with RSS hardliners and detractors within his own party, it also gave the Congress party chief Sonia Gandhi time to chalk out her immediate inner-party moves. The victory in Delhi, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh may have muted the murmurs of protest but she knows that the likes of Pawar are still to be dealt with.

Signs of the unusual ruling party-opposition cooperation were evident even before the session began. P.M. Sayeed quotes Vajpayee as telling him before his election as Deputy Speaker: "You are the best choice. I am trying. Let's just wait." He waited and Vajpayee kept his word. In return, Sonia took upon herself the task of silencing her partymen who were out to derail the Government and its agenda. There were differences within the Congress, as indeed in the BJP, over the Insurance Regulatory Authority (IRA) Bill. But just as she needed time to bring around her partymen, Vajpayee too needed to tackle the hardliners in his party. Ditto for the Patents, Companies and Reorganisation of States bills. Sources say, shortly after Vajpayee spoke to Sonia to seek support for the Patents Bill, she summoned senior partymen for marathon consultations to silence the anti-reformists and ensure its passage. As she told the routine Monday meeting of the CPP, "We shouldn't be seen to be bailing out the Government. But we shouldn't be opposing everything and anything just for the sake of opposing."

More than seven years ago, the arrival of the P.V. Narasimha Rao government was marked by similar bonhomie between the Congress and the BJP. It lasted until December 6, 1992. Now once again, on several important legislations, the two sides came close to shaking hands. If the two eventually put their hands back into the coat pockets, without shaking them, it is because of the spreading belief that a mid-term poll is not too far away. So, if the saffron and the tri-colour are called upon to play against each other in the coming months, they cannot be paired in the doubles team now.

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