One of the most abiding stories from my reporting years is Nawaz Sharif asking me, in complete, child-like innocence, how could it be that one man who loses an election should welcome the one who vanquished him, into the chair, with folded hands.
This was the winter of 1989. India had just had a change of government, with Rajiv Gandhi handing over the reins to V.P. Singh. There was a changeover in the offing in Pakistan as well, with Benazir Bhutto looking weaker by the day. Politics in Pakistan was bitter and abusive, true to the feudal tradition of winner takes all.
In some ways, it had been no less bitter in India as well. V.P. Singh had defeated Rajiv’s Congress on the slogan of Bofors and kickbacks. But here, Nawaz Sharif saw on his television screen a scene he simply couldn’t believe – Rajiv welcoming V.P. Singh into the prime minister’s office with folded hands. This after an election where Singh had painted Rajiv and his closest allies as thieves, and in which Rajiv had lost his majority but refused to rig up an opportunistic coalition even though his was still the largest single party, arguing that the people’s verdict was that he must sit in the opposition.
“How can this happen? That new prime minister of yours, what’s his name… the one who wears a Jinnah cap sometimes,” said Nawaz, not yet fully familiar with the cast of characters in Indian politics, “he called Rajiv Bofors chor. And Rajiv is welcoming him with folded hands? How can this happen?”
Howsoever I’d try to explain to him that this is how things happened in a democracy, he wasn’t convinced. “But Rajiv must hate him. And your new prime minister called him a thief. How can they even talk to each other now?”
I tried to tell him that is how things happen in a mature democracy. People fight, argue, win and lose but they always maintain a civil relationship. They meet socially and they are all together in parliament anyway.
“But look at me and Benazir,” he complained. “When we see each other at an airport we do not even wave at each other. And in her public meetings she always uses insulting language about me. She even calls me Nawazoo,” he said.
“Are you always polite talking about her?” I asked.
Nawaz blushed. Said, not quite. And I lectured him on the need for the politicians of Pakistan to learn from their counterparts in India, with a much greater experience of democratic behaviour, parliamentary practice.
“Kaise hoga? (How will this happen?) You have a forty-year headstart. It will take a very long time for us to progress that far,” he said.
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It is just as well now that Nawaz Sharif sits in exile in Jeddah and is hopefully not following the way our political class has behaved over the past weeks. Far from setting the standards for the newer, less mature democracies to aspire to, we have now regressed. We have passed a budget without debate. A budget session has been adjourned a week prematurely as if it was a mere formality, the way you would think of a legislature in a banana republic, or a “controlled” democracy of the kind three different generals have given Pakistan in three decades – Ayub in the ’60s, Zia in the ’80s and now Musharraf. Parliamentary committees haven’t done their work.
More than 40 important legislations are pending, and many will have to be temporarily back-stopped by ordinances. Our seniormost politicians, instead of putting their heads together and rolling back this slide, are engaged in a game of name-calling not seen even in days when our politics was much more bitter, before and after the Emergency, for example. There was a time, yes, when Sanjay Gandhi and his brash brigade of MPs had tried some noisy stalling tactics in parliament. But even that never led to this kind of a legislative breakdown.
Then, senior parliamentarians from all sides had sensed that this was causing them all damage and put their heads together to bring back some sanity. Why is it then that now some of the very same people, wiser by almost another quarter century of parliamentary experience, are not seeing the need to apply the same correction? Why is it that, instead, they are themselves raising questions on each other’s manners, politeness, understanding of democratic convention and so on? What kind of an example are they setting for others, particularly for those who look to Indian democracy for inspiration? Or let me put it differently. What would a Nawaz Sharif say now if he saw the live television coverage of our parliament over the past weeks?
Forget Nawaz Sharif. How would any fellow Indian, particularly an educated young Indian who is contemptuous of politics and politicians anyway, feel when all he sees is members rushing to the well, a helpless, pained speaker, serial adjournments and a finance minister explaining the changes in his budget through the media outside the parliament hall? If at the end of a new government’s first parliament session, two of our most respected leaders, Manmohan Singh and Vajpayee, have to end up having an argument over decency and correctness in parliamentary conduct, it must mark a terrifying low in our political history.
It is easy to state the obvious: that the time to correct this is now. How this can/should be done is also obvious. Our seniormost politicians, captains of our parliament, irrespective of which party they happen to belong to, must see the danger now and back-track from this ruinous path. What they need to do is also obvious. They need to get together, forget this session as a bad dream for which they must apologise, at least in their hearts, to the people of India, and work out a new modus vivendi for sessions to come. The rise of “tainted” politicians in parliament and cabinet, the “insults” to historic figures, Savarkar or any others, are all valid issues and parliament is the forum to debate these, or to complain or protest. Nobody benefits from the stalling of parliament.
Similarly, leaders of the nation, particularly the prime minister, have to always show much greater patience with the Opposition. A leader has to have a heart big enough to absorb the day’s irritation and take the moral high ground. The time to introspect, to apply the correctives is now. This parliament, more than any in two decades, has marked the beginning of a generational shift in our politics. It is now for Vajpayee, Advani, Manmohan Singh, Somnath Chatterjee, George Fernandes, Chandra Shekhar and others of the same seniority to decide what kind of tradition they want to leave behind for the generation of Rahul Gandhi, Sachin Pilot, Milind Deora, Manvendra Singh, Akhilesh Yadav and so on. Or just in case Nawaz Sharif’s watching TV in Jeddah.