Heeding the spirit

of the amendment
or the second year in a row, an Oppositionsponsored amendment to the Motion of Thanks
on the Presidents Address has been adopted by
the Rajya Sabha. Last year, the Motion of Thanks
was amended on the issue of black money; this week, the
amendment focussed on legislation passed by Bharatiya
Janata Party governments in Rajasthan and Haryana limiting the rights of citizens to contest panchayat elections.
Before 2015, there were just three occasions on which the
Presidents Address was amended in the Rajya Sabha,
once each during the tenures of Indira Gandhi, V.P. Singh
and Atal Bihari Vajpayee. The Presidents Address sets
out a governments policies and programmes, and is first
approved by the Union Cabinet. Should an amendment
to the Address be carried through in the Lok Sabha, the
government would have to resign. There is, of course, no
such obligation in the Rajya Sabha, but it is still seen to
undermine the governments ability at consensus-building. For the members of the Rajya Sabha, it is a way to give
notice that they cannot be taken for granted. It is therefore not just an embarrassment for the BJP-led National
Democratic Alliance government to have faced this situation twice less than halfway through its five-year term.
It also hints at the ruling partys failure to reach out to the
Opposition and forge a working consensus on the legislative agenda. With its clear majority in the Lok Sabha, the
BJP may feel unencumbered by the need for floor management of the sort that ruling coalitions have had to
work at over the past couple or decades this weeks
vote shows that its lack of numbers in the Rajya Sabha
does in fact demand an inventive outreach to the Opposition if it wants support on important Bills in the Upper
House.
The first instance of such an amendment to the Motion
of Thanks came in 1980 on the issue of engineering defections. The second was in 1989, when six amendments
including on the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid dispute and the India-Sri Lanka accord were approved.
The third occasion was in 2001, when the House adopted
an amendment on the sale of a public sector undertaking,
Balco, to a private company. These were all politically
contentious issues. So was the issue on which the Opposition parties mobilised themselves this year, and it raises vital questions for democracy. Imposing curbs on who
may contest panchayat elections based on requirements
of educational qualifications and having toilets in homes
effectively cuts the underprivileged out of the fray. The
BJP could plead helplessness over its lack of numbers in
the Rajya Sabha, and instead cite the passage in the
House of the Real Estate Bill this week as proof that it is
getting on with its legislative workload. Or it could heed
the spirit of the institutional mechanism of the amendment to a Motion of Thanks, and take up the subject highlighted for a follow-up debate in Parliament.