Legislative impasse

Better political management can help

At least seven important bills including the nuclear liability bill, the foreign universities bill, the women’s reservation bill and a couple of other long-standing economic bills are all awaiting parliamentary approval and seem unlikely to secure it. Congress Party managers are blaming the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Left Front for this legislative impasse, especially in the upper house of parliament, the Rajya Sabha. The ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA) coalition does not have the numbers in the Rajya Sabha to get official bills passed. In the Lok Sabha the UPA has the numbers but the margin has come down sharply with supporting parties like the Rashtriya Janata Dal, the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party no longer extending unconditional support to the UPA. With a wafer thin majority in the Lok Sabha, where the UPA now has 277 members in the 543 member house, the government feels constrained to back off. This is an unfortunate turn of events given that the UPA came to power with a massive majority and the opposition virtually decimated. How has the government come to this pass? In part this was bound to happen, given that some of the fellow travellers of the UPA are rivals of the Congress Party at the state level and should be expected to drift away as state elections approach. This is the case with the RJD. In Uttar Pradesh, however, the Congress has managed to alienate both the BSP and the SP, each with 21 members in the Lok Sabha. The BJP and the Left should have been expected to become more assertive given that they have to recover lost ground before the next round of assembly elections.

All this ought to have been factored into the government’s strategy for legislative action. It cannot be that the government becomes legislatively incapacitated so early in its tenure in office. Part of the problem is within the ruling coalition, indeed, the ruling party. The Congress Party must evolve a strategy to deal with this impasse. To begin with it must shepherd its own troops more effectively. The government has had avoidable embarrassment in parliament due to poor floor management and inadequate attendance by ruling party members. More importantly, the Congress should reach out to the BJP. The UPA may find the Left Front more difficult to appease since the Left is going in for elections in the only two states it is in office, namely West Bengal and Kerala, in 2011. The BJP is also ideologically closer to the Congress on key economic and national security issues. Reaching out to the BJP would certainly help the government push through its bills in parliament. It is time the Congress treated the BJP as a normal political party, indeed a party of government, considering that the BJP runs more state governments than the Congress. The manner in which the women’s reservation bill was passed in the Rajya Sabha, with even the Left joining hands with the BJP, shows the benefits of political cooperation in non-election season. It is the country as a whole that benefits from cooperative engagement between major political parties when it comes to important legislative business. This should be the guiding principle.