If only Rahul Gandhi could have been cautioned in foresight, before causing Gaurav Gogoi to table a No-Confidence motion in the Lok Sabha:
You don’t just get reinstated as a Member of the Parliament , you don’t just form a mega alliance of opposition parties against the ruling government, you don’t just regain your bungalow on Lutyen’s without first losing it, you don’t just get the Supreme Court of India to suspend your sentence unless you really have real work to do as an opposition leader.
It is as though the strategic efforts of Sr Adv AM Singhvi have failed to rub off on the newly reinstated leader of the grand old party.
The enigma of being able to walk back into the Lok Sabha and to participate in debates on important pieces of legislation were more than sufficient to keep the ruling party and its members guessing about Rahul Gandhi’s next move.
The fact that the ousted leader during the period of his disqualification, had managed to forge a multi-party alliance against the authoritarianism of the present day ruling government was a feat in itself.
The foresight of the upcoming elections in March, 2024 and the reigniting of the Bharat Jodo Yatra were variables in favour of restraint of the I.N.D.I.A. alliance, whereby they could systematically deconstruct the selective governance practices of the ruling government and demonstrate to the electorate the lapses in the present policies of the ruling government.
Unfortunately, on the 9th and 10th of August, 2023, the members of the opposition in the Lok Sabha chose to kamikaze their shoddily envisaged no-confidence motion right into the teeth of the awaiting veterans who are adept at the art of misdirection.
And for whose benefit was it that the responsible members of the opposition chose to expose their vulnerabilities and even get suspended from the Lok Sabha. The sacrilege ought to have bear some ultimate aim.
From a lawyer’s point of view, and in going by the arguments advanced by Sr Adv AM Singhvi before the Supreme Court of India that caused the Apex Court to suspend the sentence of Rahul Gandhi, the contentions need to be reiterated:
1) That the former Congress president’s comments on the “Modi surname” were not an offence against society
2) “The judge treats this as a serious offence involving a moral turpitude. This is a non-cognisable, bailable, and compoundable offence. The offence was not against society, not kidnapping, rape, or murder. How can this become an offence involving moral turpitude?”
3) “In the democracy, we have dissent, in democracy we have disagreement. What we call ‘shaleen bhasha’. Gandhi is not a hardened criminal. There are many cases filed by BJP workers, but there was never any conviction. Gandhi has already missed two sessions of the Parliament,”
Even otherwise, no political scientist in their right mind would acquiesce in the attribution of past milestones of its parties in identifying a newly formed alliance of leaders of the opposition.
The new alliance initially needs to prove itself first, through the time tested machinery of demonstrating dissent in the form of Legislative discourse that shreds the unconstitutional principles of the ruling party’s policies.
Instead of doing so, the opposition chose to hurl unfounded remarks of “desh drohi” upon the Prime Minister for his alleged silence on the Manipur issue.
Perhaps, seldomly in the history of no confidence motions would such a daredevil move would be witnessed ever again that the opposition decided to term the silence of the security administration of Manipur as an act of treason when at the very most in legal terms it would amount only to governmental negligence.
Imagining how unfortunate it must feel to be compared to your own grandfather’s negligence of Assam in 1962 when China was invading the North Eastern State, that a lack of foresight could be the only plausible explanation for bringing up the violence in Manipur that is currently the result of insurgency and rebellion between different factions of the population in the State of Manipur.
That is why it would have been wise not to dabble into the earlier lapses of the NDA government when the identity of the I.N.D.I.A. alliance is so closely linked to the UPA, given that the new alliance has no real achievements of its own.
According to Pietraszewski et al. (2015), in the research article titled:
‘Constituents of political cognition: Race, party politics, and the alliance detection system’
“Research suggests that the mind contains a set of adaptations for detecting alliances: an alliance detection system, which monitors for, encodes, and stores alliance information and then modifies the activation of stored alliance categories according to how likely they will predict behavior within a particular social interaction.”
In applying the alliance forming principles to current studies, Pietraszewski et al. (2015) were able to examine if shared political opinions produced these same effects.
That is, in particular,
(1) if participants would spontaneously categorize individuals according to the parties they supported, even when explicit cooperation and antagonism were absent, and
(2) if party support was sufficiently powerful to decrease participants’ categorization by an orthogonal but typically-diagnostic alliance cue (in this case the target’s race).
Pietraszewski et al. (2015) found evidence for both:
That is the participants spontaneously and implicitly kept track of who supported which party, and when party cross-cut race”such that the race of targets was not predictive of party support”categorization by race was dramatically reduced.
Hence, the newly formed I.N.D.I.A. alliance should have given deeper thought about its former affiliations attributable to the original parties who stood in opposition against the current ruling government.
