The BJP is signalling all of Parliament that it prefers ‘magnificent isolation’ to making common cause with others in the Opposition
When Congress chief Sonia Gandhi recently telephoned and urged Leader of the Opposition Sushma Swaraj to end her party’s tactics of obstruction and return to Parliament to debate so-called “Coalgate” allegations, the BJP leader’s response made some believe that the saffron outfit was possibly offering the way to a compromise so that Parliament might run normally. But it has since become clear that the hope was misplaced.
What has become evident, instead, is that Ms Swaraj may not have been on the same wavelength as others in the leadership of the BJP’s parliamentary wing. (As for the main BJP organisation, we cannot know what it is thinking. Party president Nitin Gadkari has gone off to Canada on a family vacation at a time of parliamentary crisis triggered by his party. The RSS, too, has been quiet.)
Ms Swaraj — according to the version supplied by her to the media — told Mrs Gandhi that the BJP could consider a return to normality if the government set up an independent inquiry into “Coalgate” and cancelled the coal block allotments, exactly the same demands that the Samajwadi Party, the Left and the Telugu Desam have made. She made no reference to the resignation of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, which her party’s other stalwarts have been insisting on.
But no sooner did the Leader of the Opposition spell out her terms than she was contradicted by the BJP spokesman, who amplified on what she said and added that the PM would still have to go. There was to be no let-up there. Ms Swaraj soon fell in line, and has indicated as much. Which means we are back to square one, and there can be no serious expectation of salvaging the Monsoon Session of Parliament.
In other words, the BJP is signalling all of Parliament, not just the UPA, that it prefers “magnificent isolation” — to use Arun Jaitley’s expression in a newspaper article — to making common cause with others in the Opposition. It reckons this will single it out in the eyes of the people as the principal fighter against corruption, of which it has blamed the government.
What’s clear is that the demand for an independent inquiry into coal block allocations, and the simultaneous cancellation of the allocations, are illogical. How can allotments made over many years (involving two NDA governments and three involving the Congress since 1993), involving a range of actors at the Centre and in Opposition-run states, be summarily done away with in the absence of wholesale malfeasance being established by an inquiry? The demand for the PM’s resignation appears extraordinary in the circumstances. Besides, only Parliament can decide on an inquiry, and its nature, when it is in session.