No Questions, Mr Speaker

To use the pandemic as an excuse to restrict Parliament is highly disingenuous

- Sagarika Ghose

Long before Prime Minister Narendra Modi, there was PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee, whose primary identity was that of an outstanding parliamentarian. Elected to Lok Sabha a remarkable 10 times, hurling speech after thundering speech, taking opposition attacks on the chin, when Vajpayee was PM it was sometimes so difficult to get him out of the House, that government files had to be taken to his Parliament office.

Vajpayee followed the example of his self-confessed role model, Jawaharlal Nehru, the original parliament arian-PM who not only attended Parliament almost every day but prepared painstaking replies to all questions directed at him. Nehru and Vajpayee would have recoiled in horror at the Modi government’s recent decision to virtually abandon a long established parliamentary tradition – question hour.

Question hour in Parliament is an hour when MPs get to cross-question and interrogate ministers on urgent issues, a crucial democratic institution by which peoples’ representatives hold a powerful executive accountable. The government last week decided that for the upcoming monsoon session it was going to “do away temporarily with question hour due to the extraordinary situation caused by Covid”. Question hour is to be drastically truncated: No questions can be asked extempore, only written questions are to be submitted beforehand to which ministers will give scripted answers.