A reticent Arun Jaitley has never been a problem for the Congress Party in upper house of the Parliament. He is too elite in his own special ways to wage a war in the Rajya Sabha. To some conspiracy theorists, Jaitley is even a Congress insider. A stooge they say. And Subramanian Swamy is everything that Arun Jaitley is not. He is verbally violent, logically unassailable, is in a perennial mode offensive and has a knack for sneering at his Adversaries. Swamy in simple words is a villain that Congress doesn’t wish to fight and a hero that a lot of BJP lovers wanted in the parliament and now that the villain-for-some-hero-for-many is finally in the Parliament, The film got to be interesting. Look at how people reacted to his heroics in the Rajya Sabha.
“I will take action against you. Subramanian Swamy you are unnecessarily provoking. I will have to take action against you… you are provoking,”
– PJ Kurien, Deputy Chairman of the Rajya Sabha
“Subramanian Swamy was “needling and provoking” by bringing in reference to another country. This is deliberate.”
– Jairam Ramesh, Senior Congress Leader
“There are 365 days in a year, how many times are you going to expunge his words. Swamy does not know the difference between street language and parliamentary words”
– Ghulam Nabi Azad, Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha
A high octane political drama has been raging in the Parliament ever since it emerged that kickbacks were paid in India for the Rs. 3,600 crore deal with AgustaWestland for 12 helicopters to be used by leaders. And in the light of it, Subramanian Swamy has had a busy first week as a Rajya Sabha MP. His comments were expunged twice in two days. All hell broke loose when he named Congress president Sonia Gandhi in connection with the AgustaWestland scam on Wednesday. And then on Thursday his sly reference to Italy during a discussion on the Aligarh Muslim University left the Congress fuming and was expunged again.
To which Swamy said “Fine folks, I will not mention That Lady’s Name”
Unfazed by the Opposition’s wails in the parliament and expunging of his comments, Swamy moved a privilege motion against Ghulam Nabi Azad. He moved a Breach of Privilege against Ghulam Nabi Azad for his false statement in Rajya Sabha that UPA had blacklisted Finmeccanica. And then he also filed a Notice in Rajya Sabha challenging the expunging of his words by Deputy Chairman, since it was arbitrary unreasonable and against the Rules of the Rajya Sabha.
Now that’s what you call a power packed week. And this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody who has followed Swamy’s political career. Subramanian Swamy, in a way, began the downward descent of the Congress party by highlighting the inconsistencies in the system of spectrum allocation in 2008. Swamy upped the ante and accused Congress of Electoral Corruption in 2012 when he came to the court stating EVM fraud had a huge role to play in the victory of UPA-2. It was on his advice that the Supreme Court directed the Election Commission to implement audit trail system in 2014 general election in phases. Swamy made sure Jayalalitha was convicted and sentenced for four years imprisonment in disproportionate assets case. And more recently, he dragged Gandhis to the court in the National Herald case.
Rajya Sabha was created to act as an instrument to delay action on hastily-conceived decisions, through debates and discussions by seasoned people with an amount of learning and importance. But Recently instead of serving as the voice of reason and acting as a voice of the states, Rajya Sabha has become an instrument to further the agenda of the parties that dominate it. Rajya Sabha has become synonymous to chaos. In the Monsoon Session, the productivity of Opposition dominated Rajya Sabha was a measly 9%. Most of the important bills passed by the Lok Sabha are stuck in the Rajya Sabha, simply because the RS members have better things to do like discussing Intolerance and FTII and Dadri than discussing Bills. And that’s where a player like Subramanian Swamy who doesn’t play by the rules comes in handy.
Subramanian Swamy is a man of facts. And Subramanian Swamy knows how to use hard facts as weapons. He never lets the opposition get the better of him. He marks and shoots. And he hits where it hurts the most. I won’t be surprised if he starts investigating about individual RS members to pin them on the floor when the time is ripe. Swamy is in the house with the sole purpose of demolishing the unruly opposition and I am sure he is the only man in BJP who can perform this feat with utmost sincerity and ruthless pragmatism.
http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/live-today-in-parliament-april-29-2016/article8536287.ece