The Prime Minister’s 125 days of passivity

Fans of the prime minister — and there are many — sense a drift and a lack of purpose in this third term.

In the new parliament building in February, Narendra Modi said that the BJP’s third term would be one of very important decisions that would affect the next 1,000 years. In an interview to a news channel during the campaign, he said that the results would show in the first 125 days after 4 June. The first 100 days’ agenda had already been finalised, he said, and he would use the next 25 for the youth.

None of this has come to be.

Monday, 7 October, marks 125 days since the results and a ‘nothing is happening’ feeling is endemic.

The main reason for this is that with a minority, the BJP can no longer do in Parliament what it could do between 2014 and 2024.

We have seen this with the Waqf Bill, which was sent to a joint parliamentary committee.

For the past decade, with a weak Opposition, the government had not allowed scrutiny of bills by committee. This passing of laws without any real understanding of what they contained, without any rigorous process of review or consultation, accelerated through the first decade of the Modi era.

In the 14th Lok Sabha (2004–09), 60 per cent of the bills were referred to committees for scrutiny. In the next Lok Sabha (2009–14), this number was 71 per cent. In the first Modi government, this fell to 25 per cent.

The Modi regime wilfully undid the parliamentary convention of referring bills to department-related parliamentary standing committees for scrutiny and examination right after the first victory in 2014.

The number of laws that were scrutinised before being passed collapsed after Modi’s second victory. The Opposition noticed, and 17 MPs from the Congress, the Samajwadi Party, the Bahujan Samaj Party, the Telugu Desam Party and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) wrote to the government expressing their concern at the ‘hurried passing’ of bills without scrutiny.

They wrote that public consultation—in which groups and individuals engaged with particular subjects are invited by legislators to put forward their views on prospective legislation—had also stopped. ‘Public consultation is a long-established practice where parliamentary committees scrutinise bills, deliberate, engage and work towards improving the content and quality of the legislation,’ they wrote.

This had no effect on Modi, and in 2020, not a single bill was sent to a committee for scrutiny. Between March and August that year, the government promulgated 11 ordinances, including one that amended the Income Tax Act and allowed 100 per cent tax exemption to donations made to the PM CARES fund.

Ordinances are meant to be passed only when Parliament is not in session and the government needs to take immediate action. No ordinance is allowed to be in force for more than six months without parliamentary approval. Here was legislation by ordinance that was voted into law without any scrutiny.

Even where committees were constituted, the government prevented them from working. Government MPs were ‘using the rule book to stonewall scrutiny on issues that may raise uncomfortable questions for the government’. The committee on home affairs met to discuss the decision on Kashmir after the state had already been bifurcated. After the pandemic, standing committees were disallowed from meeting even virtually, with the excuse that this might violate confidentiality.

While the Opposition MPs complained, the BJP took up and dispatched contentious laws on triple talaq and the RTI (both passed after a walkout by the Opposition), and the amendment to the UAPA that allows the government to designate individuals as ‘terrorists’.

Similarly, the farm bills, the bill that skewered Kashmir’s special status and the one amending citizenship were not referred to any of the committees of Parliament for in-depth, non-partisan deliberation.

All would produce trouble later.

PRS Legislative Research’s Chakshu Roy wrote why the abandonment of legislative scrutiny was a problem:

‘In a nutshell, all laws do not receive the same amount of parliamentary attention. A few undergo rigorous scrutiny by parliamentary committees. Others are passed with just a simple debate on the floor of the House. When the Treasury and Opposition agree, even the most far-reaching laws are passed by Parliament with alacrity. When there is disagreement on politically contentious Bills such as the two Bills related to agriculture, then the swift passage results in unruly scenes in Parliament.

‘The outweighing factor is the government’s urgency in enacting a particular legislation. When the government is in a hurry, even Bills amending the Constitution can be passed in two to three days.’

There was another problem with this: ‘When parliamentary committees do not scrutinise Bills, it increases the chances of the country being saddled with half-baked laws.’

So consultation is not only important, but necessary.

Modi reversed a tradition of consultation that even the British had followed as India’s masters. When a law on forcible indigo cultivation began to be framed in 1917 and the Champaran Agrarian Bill was introduced in the Bihar–Orissa legislative assembly, many members demanded that it be referred to the select committee of the House for scrutiny and examination. The British government conceded and Gandhi was requested to examine the bill.

With a strong Opposition in place now, the phase of absolute BJP dominance has come to an end. To govern effectively, to legislate successfully, Modi must reach out to the Opposition. He has to include it in decision-making as prime ministers before him have done. As long as he does not — and he is showing no signs that he accepts the reality — this drift his fans are anguishing over will remain. The ball, as the cliche goes, is in his court.

Views are personal. More of Aakar Patel’s writing may be read here.