Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Monday appeared so despondent at the prospect of the washout of the winter session that he reminded the Opposition of what India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had said on the running of Parliament in a speech on March 28, 1957, the last day of the first Lok Sabha.
“Here, we have sat in this Parliament, the sovereign authority of India, responsible for the governance of India. Surely, there can be no higher responsibility or greater privilege than to be a member of this sovereign body which is responsible for the fate of the vast number of human beings who live in this country. All of us, if not always, at any rate from time to time, must have felt this high sense of responsibility and destiny to which we had been called. We have functioned, therefore, during these five years not only on the edge of history but sometimes plunging into the processes of making history.”
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This reference to Nehru did not impress the Congress much, with Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad saying, “They only write blogs. When we raise crucial issues in Parliament, no action is taken. This government is behaving as if the GST is the most important thing in front of the country.”