The incidents that unfolded over a span of two days in the parliament, were nothing short of a racy comic thriller (or should I say, disastrous life tragedy). Unfortunately, at the end, many said democracy won, which was not to be.
Trust vote, as they say is all about trust and belief in a certain issue or individual. Not so in Indian politics. Trust vote here means Horse-trading.
The issue before the country today is not whether the government has the confidence of the Lok Sabha, but whether the country has confidence in its Parliament, and whether the political system has lost its legitimacy. They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. Certainly, the image of Parliamentarians waving bundles of notes in the House, towards the fag end of the debate on the trust motion, will remain etched in the minds of millions for many years. In that sense, Tuesday turned out to be one of the blackest days in the history of India’s parliament.
It is not that the buying of parliamentary votes has been a secret; the 1993 case involving Buta Singh of the Congress paying four MPs of the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (to win their support when the Narasimha Rao government faced a no-confidence vote) is fully documented, as is the extraordinary Supreme Court verdict that let the MPs go unpunished, and indeed declared innocent of the charge of corruption. Nor is it a secret that the political parties, without exception, function on the basis of unaccounted money received from business houses, who, even when they offer to pay by cheque, are asked to pay in cash instead. All MPs spend more than the stipulated limits on their election campaigns, as none other than Atal Bihari Vajpayee bemoaned a quarter century ago. In a political and electoral system manifestly oiled by unaccounted money, and which has a history of buying votes when the government was nervous about losing a confidence motion, it is not the fact of pay-offs that causes shock and dismay. Rather, it is the driving home to all citizens of what they may have been only dimly conscious of. And implicit in the crossing of that threshold of consciousness is the most serious threat to India’s political system.
India’s entire political class has to treat this as a warning, that if it does not reform the practice of politics and remove the role of unaccounted money, then the system as a whole is being placed at risk. The country has already seen evidence of the then BJP president accepting money, those associated with the then defence minister accepting money from people posing as arms sales agents, and of sundry MPs taking cash for asking questions in Parliament. In that sense, the attempt to buy three BJP MPs fits into a pattern, and the red signals are flashing loud and clear. The political class and the country as a whole ignore them at their peril. These are serious charges if proven. But the concerned MPs ought to have gone to the Speaker or the police, as a determination of their veracity is hardly likely to be made on the floor of Parliament.
Although BSP chief Mayawati called for the resignation of the prime minister on moral grounds, the mode of presentation of the evidence made things still murkier. A high-level inquiry needs to be conducted into the allegations and action taken if the charges can be proved.
But once the dust has settled, it’s also time to get on with the business of governance. There are pressing tasks ahead for the government. Tackling inflation has to be the highest priority. The country can’t afford to be rudderless at this time. There are signs of an economic slowdown now, coupled with a sharp rise in inflation rates. Fiscal deficits are going out of whack, leading international rating agency Fitch to revise India’s local currency outlook from stable to negative.

Finally, I feel sorry most for the speaker Somnath Chatterjee. He has become a speaker with no party to call his own!