New Parliament Building: Opposition boycott signals collective departure from democratic values

The new Parliament building inauguration was a much needed addition to our democracy

The Opposition’s churlish boycott of the inauguration of the new Parliament building is on very weak ground. What should have been a great moment for India’s democracy and history in the making has been sullied

Our old Parliament building was constructed about a century ago, and the Rajya Sabha and the Lok Sabha together could accommodate only 552 members. If the delimitation process is completed in 2026, the strength of Parliament should significantly outgrow its current capacity and pose an acute challenge in the conduct of business. The constraint that the old building could not be expanded adds to this challenge.

A frivolous volte-face

People of the country would want their representatives to engage in a meaningful policy-making process, but a highly stressed infrastructure without proper capacity planning would not be of any assistance – this logic was enough to commission a new Parliament building, perhaps that’s why Congress leader Jairam Ramesh, as Union minister for rural development in the second United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government in 2012, said, “We badly need a new Parliament building. This one simply isn’t functional and is outdated.”

But it defies logic when, after a decade, the same Ramesh calls the new Parliament building a colossal waste of money, and a vanity project of a dictator. More than anything, such hypocrisy and mendacity show that it is not the new Parliament building, but certain other factors that make the Opposition abstain from the inauguration ceremony.

The real reason can be as simple as the reluctance in accepting the construction work successfully carried out by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, or as complicated as fearing that the delimitation process might benefit the BJP more in larger states where it has political dominance. In either case, attacking the logic behind the new Parliament building appears incongruous. Does the Opposition really want multiple members to occupy one person’s seat? If it comes to that would they not blame the government for not doing capacity planning?

Opposition’s lame excuse

Since logic was not on their side, they raised another argument that President Droupadi Murmu was denied her constitutional right to inaugurate the new Parliament. Evidently, no constitutional provision requires the president to do such an inauguration, nor does it prevent the prime minister from doing the honours. In fact, no constitutional provision exists on Parliament inauguration at all.

It was not the British monarch King George V but Lord Irwin who had inaugurated the old Parliament building. Post-independence, it wasn’t President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed but Prime Minister Indira Gandhi who inaugurated the Parliament annexe.

In the absence of any binding provision, arguing about the president’s non-existent constitutional right is both idiocy and denial of the Congress party’s own historical decisions while in government.

The fuss about the Sengol was without rhyme or reason too. What started off as mild criticism soon turned into another war of words between two parties. Perhaps the Congress had to keep the Sengol story a low-key affair to spare a secular Jawaharlal Nehru from the allegation of taking part in a function of religious nature, but contemporary news reports leave open some interesting questions.

Everybody agrees that the Sengol was handed to Nehru on the eve of India’s Independence Day during an event at his residence. On August 11, 1947, Indian Express reported that the Sengol would be taken to the Constituent Assembly Hall in a procession. Since the Congress’s only defence now is that the Sengol was one among many gifts that Nehru received, the question is what was special about this one gift that was presented minutes before the country got freedom?

For our MPs, for our people

Opposition parties, especially the Congress, should realise that the new Parliament building belongs to the nation, and not the BJP. It is not just for the current but the future generations too. It will enable people’s representatives the space and the facilities they need to discuss, debate, make, and amend laws.

Here, the Opposition members have no qualms about boycotting the inauguration of their new workspace. If they feel they do not belong in their new workspace, how will they repay the faith people have entrusted in them?

Instead of bewailing the lost opportunity to construct a new building under UPA, or calling an essential amenity a vanity project, they would do well to win people’s mandate to occupy majority seats in the new building, or else all its political activities would become a colossal waste of resources.

Sreejith Panickar is a Kerala-based political commentator. Twitter: @PanickarS. Views are personal and do not represent the stand of this publication