India: shouting as governance

India’s parliament continued its crucial winter session on Wednesday the only way it seems to know how: with a round of protests, shouting and boycotts, and a hasty adjournment for the day.

The 21-day session, which began on Tuesday with another early adjournment, is supposed to consider 54 bills – including anti-corruption, food subsidy and whistleblower legislation, as well as fiscal reforms including FDI in retail, aviation and pension funds. It was also supposed to be the ruling United Progressive Alliance’s opportunity to prove that it is ready to govern again after a raft of corruption scandals caused policy paralysis to grip the capital.

The government had planned to pass two bills a day, many of which have been under discussion for years.

If the opening sessions were any indication, paralysis seems to be the name of the game in Delhi and Manmohan Singh the embattled prime minister and his Congress Party have a long road ahead to get his government, and India’s slowing economy, back on track.

Regional issues dominated the proceedings, adding weight to complaints that the central government has been ceding power to charismatic regional leaders like Gujarat’s Narendra Modi, a possible PM candidate for the Bharatiya Janata party, West Bengal’s Mamata Banerjee, the leader of the Trinamool Congress, and Bihar’s Nitish Kumar.

So instead of discussing how the government might fight India’s persistently high inflation, which has remained near double digits lately, or save the faltering rupee, which hit a new all-time low Tuesday morning, southern parliamentarians stood up to shout about the carving out of a separate state from Andhra Pradesh.

And instead of debating the merits of foreign direct investment in the retail sector – which could bring in massive amounts of money but also squeeze out India’s many mom-and-pop stores – or the aviation sector – where Indian airlines are in severe need of capital – or in deed the pension sector, MPs protested against plans of the chief minister of India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh, to divide it into four separate states.

Prior to the session’s opening, India Today magazine quoted a senior Congress official as saying: “The main focus of this session is antigraft measures and if the bills are delayed due to disruption of the proceedings, the Opposition would be blamed.”

And yet, instead of discussing the national anti-corruption ombudsman bill that has gripped the nation for most of this year, members of the opposition BJP called for the resignation of home minister P Chidambaram for his alleged involvement in the multibillion-dollar scam that set off India’s latest anticorruption crusade.

Instead of carrying on any of the business of a session that was meant to prove that India’s parliament was set to govern again, the session devolved into exactly the sort of thing the prime minister had appealed against before it opened.

“I sincerely hope that all political parties will realise that we have some very important pieces of legislation which are going to be presented in this session, and our country’s sustained development and prosperity demands that many of those bills should be converted as acts of parliament,” he said.

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