The nation must not sleep over what has given the chairman of the Rajya Sabha a ‘sleepless night’. A distressed M. Venkaiah Naidu said that the pandemonium witnessed recently in the upper House — he has held members of the Opposition guilty of unruly conduct — had caused him to lose sleep. The word is that Mr Naidu is scrutinizing legal precedents and deliberating with senior officials to chalk out a deterrent. Committees exist to examine the moral and ethical responsibilities as well as the privileges of House members. Hopefully, Mr Naidu’s deliberations would be of participatory nature so that government and Opposition can find a way out of the mess together. It is the absence of collaboration that seems to have crippled Parliament. The Centre, typically, has passed the buck, blaming its political opponents. Yet, it has shown a marked disinclination to respond to the charges hurled at it by the Opposition. These range from a shocking obduracy on the part of Narendra Modi and his government to refuse to discuss issues of pertinent public interest and national security — the allegations of snooping on Indian citizens, the farmers’ stir, a heated border with China, the mismanagement of the Covid-19 pandemic and so on — to the alleged manhandling of Opposition members inside the House to the creation of a twisted, unbalanced narrative that seeks to demonize the Opposition for the logjam.

The consequences of this firefight go beyond the dire implications for the spirit of parliamentary, if not political, consensus. Policy-making is being adversely affected by the truncated sessions. There is also a case for examining Parliament’s productivity beyond the number of sittings. The Bharatiya Janata Party’s electoral dominance has coincided with the emergence of a dispensation that is no longer willing to send bills to a parliamentary committee for wider, representative discussions. Even the Chief Justice of India has taken note of the absence of debate, deepening apprehensions about the Centre’s preference for a unilateral nature of governance. Mr Naidu should wield the stick against not only unacceptable behaviour but also violations of the moral and ethical imperatives that underpin parliamentary democracy. The stick should also be used to beat transgressors, be they from the government or the Opposition, in an unbiased manner.