In the stand off between the Congress and the BJP, two main political parties in India, Parliament has been reduced to an arena where both are displaying their prowess. It does not matter to them whether the apex body in a democratic system functions or not but their focus is on which party out of the two emerges victorious. This is the worst scenario the elected representatives can place before the nation.
The point at issue is corruption but the parties have been stalling the two houses for the last two weeks (MPs are getting their emoluments without transacting any business). In the process, the issue of corruption has got pushed into the background. The spot light is on their divergent points of view. The opposition parties in concert have demanded the appointment of Joint Parliament Committee (JPC) to go into the gamut of Telecommunication deals worth one lakh and seventy five thousand crore of rupees and the Commonwealth games expenditure escalating to seventy five thousand crore of rupees. The ruling Congress is stuck on the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) to confine the discussion to the report by the Comptroller and Audit General which has strongly indicted the outgoing Telecommunication Minister A Raja.
The public is interested only in finding out the persons responsible for the scams and where has the money gone. It does not matter to them whether JPC or PAC brings out the truth as long as the facts come to light. Because of daily quarrels in Parliament, their faith in the institution is lessening day by day. They are tired of seeing the same spectacle over and over again.
Every time a scam tumbles out of governments closet, there is a familiar exercise that follows. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), an official agency, is asked to hold an enquiry. The Economic Enforcement Bureau gets into action. Home Minister and some other senior cabinet ministers say in a press interview that the guilty will not be spared. Soon it is business as usual. But the exercise begins again when another scandal rocks the country.
In the process, something ominous is happening, probably unwittingly. While dealing with scams, the political parties are whittling down the federal structure of the polity. A case relating to Maharashtra has also been included in the proposed probe by the JPC. State Chief Minister Asok Chavan had to resign because he allotted a flat to her mother-in-law. How can parliament take into account the housing project in a State? If parliament is going beyond its authority and discussing state subjects, the State legislatures may also be tempted to discuss what falls strictly within the precinct of Parliament. The fine balance which the constitution has indicated between the two may be damaged irreparably.
How will the BJP react if the Congress were to demand the inclusion of land scandal in Karnataka in a JPC probe? Karnataka Chief Minister B S Yeddyurappa has denotified the government land so that it is available for distribution among persons he prefers. Included among the beneficiaries are his two sons. He sees no wrong in doing so. Unfortunately, the BJP high command has allowed him to stay in office. No doubt, this is an example of double standards.
The best thing would have been for Yeddyurappa to resign, pending the inquiry Asok Chavan of the Congress resigned straightaway once he was told by his party High Command to quit. But Yeddyurappa did not do so and even challenged the BJP leaders. My information is that the reason why he did not do so was the backing of RSS, the parent body of the BJP. It is true that there are feuds in the state BJP, strong Ananta Ram is against the Chief Minister. But they have been at logger heads for a long time. The quarrel between the two would have been of little consequence if the RSS had tapped Yeddyurappas shoulder and asked him to go.
In fact, the prestige that the BJP had built in having the Telecommunication Minister quit has been damaged by its stand on Yeddyurappa. The party is rightly taunted by the Congress which showed decisiveness in the case of Asok Chavan.
The spat in Parliament or the fallout is the symptom, not the disease. The disease is their hostility one is trying to down the other, without thinking of the impression they are making on the people, who are sick of both. A democratic system cannot work without the consensus. For some years, the minimum equation between the two has gone and it is affecting the polity.
The Manmohan Singh government has, no doubt, made Suresh Kalmadi heading the Commonwealth Games resign from the office of Secretary of the Congress parliamentary party and Chief Minister Asok Chavan from his office because of faulty allotment of flats by the housing society. Yet the system has not changed and no top bureaucratic has been ever touched.
The fact is that the entire system is rotten. Whether the Congress government or the BJP has the courage to overhaul it remains to be seen. The bureaucracy is too strong and too united. Once I asked Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee why his government had made no mark, he said that the bureaucracy did not allow them to function.
The credit of exposures goes primarily to the media which followed relentlessly a few leads and brought out most of the information. The government was at first reluctant to admit the scam. Later, when political parties added their voice to the medias demand for a probe, the government was forced to take action.
Undoubtedly, the Congress has a secular face compared to the BJPs communal credentials. But corruption has eaten into the Congress support base. I am worried about Manmohan Singhs reputation. It is up to the Prime Minister how he wants posterity to remember him. He cannot run with the hares and hunt with the hounds.
The problem with India or, for that matter, the countries in South East Asia is that the governments, either at the Centre or in the States, are reeking with corruption. No government file moves until a babus palm is greased. Administrative reforms mean little when there is a nexus between the executive and the bureaucracy and when there is no accountability.
The writer is a senior Indian journalist.
