Swaraj praises, Modi smiles & MPs get ready for a ride

The usual prosaicness of a joint meeting of all MPs from a party was enlivened by the External Affairs Minister's speech about the PM

Parliamentary party meetings — a joint meeting of all members of Parliament (MPs) from a party — held at the beginning of the session are usually anodyne affairs. When it was in power, the Congress Parliamentary Party (CPP) used to be invariably addressed by Sonia Gandhi, who would read out a prepared speech that would then be dutifully circulated to reporters.

The pattern changed when Narendra Modi became Prime Minister. In the Budget session in May, he asked MPs how many remembered all the schemes his government had rolled out. He asked MPs to explain the Jan Dhan Yojana and when they couldn’t, chided them for not publicising the good work done by the government. At a similar meeting two years ago, he criticised the conduct of some MPs and ministers who had been giving vent to anti-minority statements.

A parliamentary party meeting on Tuesday, however, was an occasion to celebrate. Three ministers —  Information Minister Venkaiah Naidu, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj — explained to MPs what the government was doing in their three fields.

But it was a visibly indisposed Swaraj who ran away with the ball, as she described all the initiatives the Prime Minister and the government had taken — including signing the Missile Technology Control Regime and becoming a member of the elite club — amid applause from the MPs.

Swaraj could not even climb the dais to speak and sat on a chair below the steps in the central hall of Parliament, the event’s venue, as she gave a factual but rivetting account of all that the government had achieved in the sphere of foreign affairs. The PM couldn’t suppress a smile when Swaraj referred to his speech at the US Congress, where he referred specifically to the headache that the Upper House has caused him occasionally. Swaraj said Manmohan Singh had addressed the Congress and was applauded 38 times. But when Modi spoke, she said, after the 60th round of a standing ovation midway through his speech, “I stopped counting.”

She also recounted how the Chair stood up to escort Modi out but he had to keep waiting as US Congressmen had crowded around the PM for selfies, shake his hand and get his autograph. It was finally Modi who interceded: “This is embarrassing. The Chair is on his feet … please let us go outside.”

Swaraj’s speech had all the MPs thumping the table. The PM said ahead of the 70th year of India’s independence, at least 70 among the hundreds of schemes launched by the government for the poor should be publicised by MPs. MPs were told to draw up programmes in seven days involving them covering their constituencies on motorcycles, to tell the people what the government had done for them. Naidu described the two-year celebrations of the NDA government (called Vikas Parv) and the programmes that were held countrywide.

A particularly elderly MP was enthused enough to declare: “Motorcycle? If this PM asks me to carry his message on a bullock cart, I will do it for him.”

Jaitley explained the finer points of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) constitutional amendment Bill that the government wanted to pass in the Rajya Sabha next week. Telling MPs that all chief ministers were supporting the GST Bill, he said it was a measure that would radically change the way India does business —and silly objections raised by the Congress should not be allowed to derail such a legislation. He cited the Compensatory Afforestation Fund Management and Planning Authority (CAMPA) Amendment Bill as an example: The legislation was meant to deliver funds to state governments to undertake afforestation, but the Congress was proposing so many amendments that it would be a miracle if the Bill ever saw the light of day. It was time to get tough, Jaitley told MPs, asking them to co-ordinate with other supporting parties for GST and CAMPA.