Ushered into a logjam owing to the National Herald case that has put the Congress top brass in a dock, threat now looms large on the Winter Session in Parliament and it might just be another washout.
Worse, the Goods and Services Tax Bill won’t see the light of the day and it is well on schedule to miss its April deadline unless a miracle gets the Parliament working before the session winds up on 23 December. Needless to say, the country which is already under immense financial pressure requires these reforms urgently.
Although the National Herald case, which now has Congress president Sonia Gandhi and the second-in-command Rahul Gandhi as accused and are being asked to before a trial court on 19 December, should have been completely legal, the Grand Old Party has made it a largely political one. Even the Prime Minister’s Office has not been spared and has been under constant attack by the Congress. Ironically, the National Herald case was filed when Manmohan Singh was prime minister and Subramanian Swamy was the then Janata Party president and not a BJP member.
Unhappy with the manner the largest Opposition party is behaving in Parliament, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Monday took to Facebook to quote first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s speech in Parliament highlighting what kind of responsibilities the members of both the Houses have. Following is Jaitley’s post:
“The last Session of the Parliament did not function. The current Session of the Parliament is also threatened with a wash out. The reasons for the wash out of the current Session keep changing by the hour. The nation is waiting for the Parliament to discuss public issues, to legislate and approve a historic Constitution Amendment enabling the GST. All this is being indefinitely delayed. The question we need to ask ourselves is, “are we being fair to ourselves and this country?
Today, I re-read a speech on the Parliamentary system by Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru. It was delivered on 28th March, 1957 – the last day of First Lok Sabha. The speech is a must read for all of us. An important paragraph of the speech reads thus:
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. Whether we were worthy of it or not is another matter. We have functioned, therefore, during these five years not only on the edge of history but sometimes plunging into the processes of making history.”
Those who claim the legacy of Pandit ji must ask themselves the question, what kind of history are they making.”