Lokpal fuels all-out war between UPA, Oppn
BJP asks why PM, Pranab were mute in RS
A day after the Rajya Sabha slugfest, it was a no-holds barred blame-game. With Parliament failing to pass the controversial Lokpal and Lokayukta Bill in the winter session, ruling UPA and the main Opposition BJP cried foul on Friday as they attempted mudslinging against each other for the Bill’s ‘debacle.
Both the BJP and the Congress fielded their top leaders to ensure that they came out all guns blazing. They did not disappoint. BJP’s Opposition Leaders in the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sbaha, Sushma Swaraj and Arun Jaitley respectively, matched word-to-word with Congress leaders and Union Ministers P Chidambaram, Ghulam Nabi Azad, Ambika Soni and Pawan Kumar Bansal.
Not to be left behind, outside the House, Team Anna joined the issue. Its members blamed the government for deceiving the people. It did not spare Rajya Sabha Chairman Hamid Ansari and faulted him for abruptly adjourning the Upper House sine die, without a vote on the Lokpal Bill. Trinamool Congress, the UPA ally which opposed the Bill, rubbed salt on the government’s wound as its MP Derek O’Brien defended his party, saying what happened in the Rajya Sabha was, “shameful, a sad day for democracy.”
Thus, though the Bill had gone into cold storage, the rhetoric - outside Parliament and with an eye on the forthcoming elections to five states including Uttar Pradesh - was at the top. The BJP demanded Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s resignation and announced an ‘oust Congress’ agitation from January 3 to 10.
As the political war broke out, Jaitley said: “At the stroke of midnight hour when the world slept, India awoke to a fraud being played on its parliamentary democracy.” With the government bruised, an upbeat BJP leaders alleged that the disturbances caused in the House had the ‘blessings’ of the prime minister and Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee.
Jaitley wanted to know why both the prime minister and Mukherjee kept quiet in the House when so much was happening. He asked why a minister of state (V Narayanasamy) was asked to respond at the end and not a senior minister, in the Upper House on Thursday.
Charging the government with preventing the nation from getting a strong Lokpal, he said it was ‘very capable’ of manipulation, managing and fixing. Jaitley said: “The strategy of the BJP and several other Opposition parties was to defeat a weak and spurious Lokpal law and insist on amendments which would improve and convert the weak law into a strong law.” Jaitley added that “subversion of Rajya Sabha by the government by denying it the opportunity to make an effective legislation is a significant moral scar on this government.
The prime minister must now live with one more moral stigma. He won the 2008 vote of confidence through bribery."
Embattled government
An embattled government, insisting that the anti-corruption bill would be back in Parliament during the budget session, lashed out at the BJP. "Right from the beginning, the BJP's intention was to see that the Bill is not passed in Parliament … they want to keep it in limbo. It was a BJP-orchestrated drama."
No intention
“The BJP had no intention to pass the Bill. So they hit upon an indigenous device to move 187 amendments, many of them contradictory and many of them cannot be reconciled in a few minutes," Chidambaram said."The cat was out of the bag when the Leader of the Opposition said at the start of the debate yesterday (Thursday) that we are confident that three crucial amendments will be passed.
“How did he know? So they must have got into an understanding with some other parties," Chidambaram said.
