Note ban’s shadow on politics to linger

Parliament’s Winter Session ended Friday much the same way it had begun, with some Opposition parties approaching the President on demonetisation matters. The government did not facilitate a discussion on this vital issue, that cast a long shadow and stopped both the Houses from taking up any other matter.

If the government’s opponents approached Rashtrapati Bhavan in the early part of the session to highlight the suffering caused by demonetisation, their call on the President at the session’s end was to complain that as the people’s representatives they were being denied the right to speak in Parliament as even ministers had taken to rushing to the Well of the Lok Sabha to create disorder, maybe to stop Congress leader Rahul Gandhi elaborating on the subject of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s alleged “personal corruption” under the shelter of an MP’s privileges.

The picture in both cases was that of several Opposition parties acting in concert to register their grievance before the President, though this is not the same as “Opposition unity”, a much-touted phrase nowadays. The latter specifically means “unity” in order to shape and advance a common cause by political actors that may otherwise differ with one another.

There is no indication so far that this was on the agenda, although the media’s portrayal suggests that Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi was responsible for breaching “Opposition unity” when he took a delegation of his party to the PM on the issue of farmers’ distress in Uttar Pradesh and Punjab, where the Congress recently ran a month-long campaign on farmers’ issues in the run-up to Assembly polls.

Such a representation arose from the fact that some parties which agreed to join the common delegation to Rashtrapati Bhavan declined to do so at the last minute as they were uncomfortable with Mr Gandhi’s decision to meet the PM to press the acceptance of states-centric demands.

That’s a decision for individual parties, for there was no post-Winter Session unity on the cards as each party involved in the UP or Punjab campaign was expected to take steps according to its own lights.

The Congress was reportedly going by its understanding that Mr Modi may announce a loan waiver and seek to grab credit for it. The Congress was thus keen to upstage him by seeking to suggest that if such a step was going to be taken, it was under pressure from it. These are just games that parties play to outsmart one another. In the end, the UP or Punjab poll result will crucially depend on a clutch of local factors, and in the former be an outcome of strategic understanding between parties. All this will of course be in the backdrop of demonetisation.