At the end of the first half of the Budget Session that concluded on Friday, the government’s parliamentary managers had every reason to congratulate themselves: in the course of a mere 19 sittings of both Houses, the government converted five of six ordinances into law; presented the Union Budget and the Railway Budget; and pushed through the Appropriation and Appropriation Vote on Account Bills, 2015 relating both to the Railway and the Union budgets in the Lok Sabha.
But the record of the Opposition parties, given its abysmally low numbers in the Lok Sabha, and differences — ideological or otherwise — in its ranks was not that bad either. Deploying strategy, guile and determination, they first masterminded the Modi government’s first defeat in Parliament on March 3, moving an amendment to the Motion of Thanks to the President for his address that was carried in the Rajya Sabha, 118-57.
The Opposition parties, then, seized the opportunity provided by the nationwide negative response to the Land Acquisition (Amendment) Ordinance to press home their advantage inside and outside Parliament: this concluded in the visually powerful spectacle of 14 political parties, led by the Congress, walking from Parliament House to the Rashtrapati Bhawan to oppose vociferously the changes sought to be made to the 2013 Land Act.
Indeed, though the government succeeded in shattering the Opposition solidarity to clear three contentious Bills replacing ordinances — the Insurance Bill, the Coal Bill, the Mines and Minerals Bill — the fate of the Land Bill is still causing anxiety to the government. In the Insurance Bill’s case, it reminded the Congress that it had been first introduced by it when the UPA was in power; in the case of the other two, the government used the carrot and the stick, by turns, to persuade all the regional parties, except the DMK — especially those ruling in the States, such as the Trinamool Congress and the Biju Janata Dal — to help it clear them.
Yet the Land Bill is causing concern to the government. It could, after all, have brought it to the Rajya Sabha — where it would have got defeated — and then taken the Bill to a joint sitting of Parliament (as it has already been passed in the Lok Sabha with nine government sponsored amendments) and rammed it through.
The Modi government has, after all, demonstrated that parliamentary tradition is secondary to its desire to move its agenda forward. But it is loath to fall foul of the voting public, particularly the farming community that sees it as anti-farmer law whose objective is to take their land and hand it over to the corporates, something acknowledged privately even by BJP leaders.
Indeed, even the short-duration discussions in this half session dealt with the farming crisis in the country: the LS debated the “Agrarian situation in the country” and the RS “Losses suffered by farmers due to recent rains in various parts of the country” and “Problems being faced by farmers of the country”. Unfortunately for the government, the Land Bill has coincided with unseasonal rains that have destroyed crops, the hike in the prices of urea and the government’s failure to increase the MSP for various crops.
The government, therefore, needs to change the optics on the Bill before taking the next step: it has, therefore, asked its Ministers and MPs to use the next four weeks before the second half of the session to explain to its constituents that this is a “pro-development”— not a “pro-corporate” — law.
An Opposition MP told The Hindu that in the course of an informal conversation with him last week, Prime Minister Narendra Modi explained to him that it was in the best interests of even farmers to accept the law as agricultural land in the country did not have the capacity to absorb all those who worked on it — many of them needed to look for other jobs.
So, if the Budget Session has seen both sides scoring their own victories, the government side has also been given lessons in parliamentary democracy by the Opposition. It has forced the Prime Minister to attend the Houses more often than he would like to, and it has also used a variety of parliamentary devices to highlight the fact that procedures are being violated, including the “fast track” Select Committees on the Coal Bill and the Mines Bill that did not consult any of the stakeholders. The government may have overcome these obstacles, but it has also brought to the fore the fact that the Opposition is alive and kicking.
