Passionate About India

Our live Parliament sessions can make a Hollywood sci-fi director feel ill at ease. One can find virtually everything flying in our Parliament – ranging from bottles to microphones to footwear... and perhaps human beings too in the near future! A glance through Lok Sabha TV or even YouTube footage of our Parliament sessions would be enough to provide evidence of the extent of lack of basic culture and education that our honorable members of Parliaments possess. What comes as an utter shame and embarrassment, especially for the electorate, is the manner in which their elected leaders represent their cause! Starting from holding footwear in their hands, to throwing abusive words, and resorting to physical violence, this is how Parliamentarians resolve their concerns in the temples of the world’s largest democracy! Last year, the Women’s Reservation Bill was disrupted to such a level that seven of our MPs had to be suspended for the remaining sessions. So much so that the MPs went to an e...

In my editorials, I have vividly written on our Parliament and Parliamentarians. From suggesting that our Parliament be outsourced (after 26/11), to asking political parties to pave the way for educated youth, to criticising the way our Parliament works, to how our Parliamentarians put their personal priorities above the national ones, I have often written about them. Be that as it may, the recent deadlock in our Parliament that lasted over eight long days made me come up with a few more urgently required and practicable measures. These eight successive days of adjournment cost the exchequer a staggering Rs 63 crores! In this whole winter session of Parliament, except for a couple of days, neither of the houses functioned normally for even one single session. For the uninitiated, as per official figures cited in various media, the total budget for the two houses for 2010-11 is estimated to be around a whopping Rs 530 crore! For the first eight days of the Parliament in this season, on...

So, the women’s reservation bill, which was first drafted by H. D. Gowda government in 1996, finally got cleared in the Rajya Sabha on the 8th of March, 2010. Of all the pending bills, this one in particular was the most contentious as most political parties could neither accept nor reject it, owing to vote-bank politics. Finally, amidst some ugly chaos and commotion, the bill got passed on the 8th of March in the Rajya Sabha. As expected, what followed was customary celebration, wherein all media houses projected the passing of the bill as one of the landmark moments in the history of independent India. No doubt, the celebrations are too early, as the real test is yet to come; and that is when it goes through the Lok Sabha. Going by the precedence set in the Rajya Sabha, things do not look that simple. From the very beginning the Congress, along with the BJP and the Left , have been in support of the bill; whereas most other political parties have been opposing the bill in its current...

With the Parliament set to resume its monsoon session by the next fortnight, the media would have a new series of pandemonium after the one which just got over with the election of our first woman President. Well, if not anyone else, at least the electronic media would find it delicious fodder, as their crew would ceremoniously wait outside the Parliament to capture ‘that’ moment whereby some non-descript Minister of some worse non-descript Ministry (we had around 53 Ministries, till the last count!) or a Member of Parliament pops out. What follows is a volley of rhetoric, from both sides, relating to topical issues pertaining to the nation. Well the honourable Parliamentarians cannot solely be blamed for such rhetoric as after a ‘consuming’ session, they are often too engaged with the thought of eating delicacies steaming in the highly subsidised Parliament canteen or cooling heels in the luxury of the opulence that the government has provided them for being the elected or selected re...