Parliamentary Logjam

It is unfortunate that the logjam in Parliament evades a solution as the contentious issues keep on piling up even as the ruling parties and the opposition parties choose not to break the logjam and make a mockery out of the parliamentary democracy. That the civil society members successfully held the entire Parliament to ransom recently appears to have been forgotten. The opposition parties seeking to further muddy the knotty national issues cannot absolve its responsibility for the governance deficit. Instead of cornering the government through participative parliamentary debate, the opposition finds it expedient to paralyse the functioning of the house, which is more suitable for the government as it can escape healthy debates on the vexed issues and escape the responsibility as well as pass important bills post haste without healthy debate. The statistics on the functioning of the present 15th Loksabha is far from inspiring for which both the ruling and the opposition parties are to be blamed. It has already earned the dubious distinction of having functioned the lowest ever for a house. It is true that ever since the 8th Term the constructive utilization of Parliamentary time has been on the slide. Uninspiringly, so far, out of the 1110 hours the 15th Loksabha sadly utilized only 798 hrs and 39 Minutes, making it only 72% quality utilsation of its time. As per the reports, even the politically daunting Bofors controversy did not result in wastage of as much time of the Parliament. What is perplexing is that out of the cumulative 200 Bills only 57 could be passed, for which hardly any meaningful discussion took place. Strangely, the 15th Loksabha will have the dubious distinction of facing the wrath of the ruling party MPs who sought to disrupted the functioning of the august house. The senior leaders of all sides must immediately bury the political differences and work towards a consensus on the healthy functioning of the 15th Parliament sooner rather than later.