Congress’ Pyrrhic victory scars India

The New Indian Express First Published : 28 Apr 2011 10:42:00 PM ISTLast Updated : 29 Apr 2011 07:25:51 AM IST
Thursday would go as one of the darkest days in India’s parliamentary history. The garrulous obstructionism displayed by the Congress and its allies in blocking the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) report on the 2G spectrum scam is a measure of their acute desperation. The fact that PAC chairman M M Joshi was forced to walk out because he was not allowed to speak shows how ugly things turned. Clear signs of this were there even before the meeting began. Vicious public attacks against Joshi by MPs and leaders of the Congress and the DMK had crossed all norms of parliamentary decorum. Backdoor manipulations to muster numbers by turning non-UPA MPs smacked of open trade-offs. The ruling establishment’s trouble-shooters may pat themselves on their back for their Pyrrhic victory. But neither history nor the people will forgive them for defeating the core tenets of parliamentary democracy and governmental transparency.
The conspiracy seems to have been hatched much before media reports indicated that the draft report would be a severe indictment of those at the top of the establishment for subverting the system. It started the day Joshi rejected objections by Congress and DMK members that the PAC should stop investigating 2G spectrum allocations because a Joint Parliamentary Committee was doing so. And it gained momentum when skeletons started tumbling out of the cupboard.
The sordid culmination of this conspiracy forms part of a more sinister pattern. The UPA and its mentors seem bent upon devaluing and destroying every institution of our polity. A creature of Gladstonian reforms of 1861 in the UK, PACs are ubiquitous features of the legislative landscape. They work on the principle that the government should be accountable to Parliament. In India, as elsewhere, they have worked above considerations of partisan politics. The sordid drama on Thursday could be the beginning of the end for this venerated institution. The irony of what its founder, William Ewart Gladstone, said in another context cannot be missed. “Politics are like a labyrinth, from the inner intricacies of which it is even more difficult to find the way of escape than it is to find the way into them.”
Topics:2G scam, PAC