New Delhi: The Narendra Modi government has had a complicated relationship with humour. The Bharatiya Janata Party’s concerted attack on Trinamool Congress MP Kalyan Banerjee over his mimicry of the Rajya Sabha chairman, Jagdeep Dhankhar, is a case in point.
To any observer, Banerjee’s act was in the spirit of a protest; a performance to evoke laughter at a time when both the Parliament had witnessed the highest-ever suspension of opposition MPs. However, the Union government took affront, and spun it as an insult to the Jats.
Dhankhar, who belongs to the Jat community, could not decide clearly whether Banerjee’s act offended his chair or his caste group.
On multiple occasions, one has heard offending remarks by Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself, not to speak about similar indulgences by other BJP leaders. Who can forget Modi’s rather caustic, and rather distasteful, “Didi o Didi” remark against the West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee. Or, his reference to Congress leader Shashi Tharoor’s wife Sunanda Pushkar as “50 crore rupee girlfriend”.
He has also referred to Rahul Gandhi as “Pappu” in many of his election speeches, even as he has made fun of opposition leaders by enacting them in the Parliament. He didn’t even spare former vice-president Hamid Ansari when he had said that Ansari’s administrative experience was restricted only around minority affairs and the Muslim world, despite Ansari’s impeccable track record as a diplomat.
However, the TMC MP’s excitable mimicry to enthuse the protesting MPs has still been amplified by the BJP as an affront to not only the Jat community but also the Rajya Sabha chair.
Such double standards only remind one of a school bully, who takes pride in shaming and ragging weaker students but can’t take even the slightest blowback in good spirit. The suspended MPs were protesting outside when Banerjee stood up to enact Dhankhar. Between all the other important issues being raised by them, including demanding an official statement by Union home minister Amit Shah on the Parliament’s security breach, and protesting against the ruling party’s high-handedness, mimicking Dhankhar appeared to be a cheerful break for them.
While other MPs enjoyed the performance, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi also shot a video of it on his phone. But a majority of television channels went on an overdrive that Gandhi shot the video to circulate it with an intention to further heap insults on the Rajya Sabha chair.
Amidst the spin-games by the ruling party to corner the opposition, the essential question that most have been asking seems to have been buried. Why has the Union home minister not issued an official statement on the security breach in the Parliament? Both Shah and Modi have been giving interviews in the press that the Union government has taken the security breach seriously and has ordered an inquiry. One also knows that the probe committee will be headed by Anish Dayal Singh, the Director-General of Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), the very agency that is in charge of security in the Parliament.
Opposition MPs have asked about a possible conflict of interest issue as it may not be right, at least in optics, for the CRPF Director-General to probe his own agency’s failure in the security breach.
Yet, the government has chosen not to address any of these concerns.
Modi has not attended a single session of the Parliament in December. Shah, who tabled the amended Criminal Law Bills on Thursday (December 21) and attempted to clear doubts on the new Bills, has evaded answering any of these serious questions in the Parliament.
Outside the House, parliamentary affairs minister Pralhad Joshi announced that the mimicry row shamed the entire country and blamed the opposition MPs for insulting the Jats, while also accusing them of shaming the Adivasis and Dalits when Droupadi Murmu and Ram Nath Kovind were chosen as the Presidents.
Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge quite rightly asked whether he should also blame the ruling party MPs for not letting him speak in the House because he is a “Dalit”. Rahul Gandhi, too, attacked the government for diverting attention from the questions that opposition MPs were raising and asked whether the TMC MP’s mimicry was more important than the concerns around security breach and unprecedented mass suspensions of opposition MPs.
“…MPs were sitting there, I shot their video. My video is on my phone. Media is showing it…Nobody has said anything…150 of our MPs have been thrown out (of the House) but there is no discussion on that in the media. There is no discussion on Adani, no discussion on Rafale, no discussion on unemployment. Our MPs are disheartened and sitting outside. But you are discussing that (mimicry)…,” Gandhi asked.
Amidst the suspensions, controversial new laws like the Telecommunications Bill 2023 and Criminal Law Bills were passed without any discussion, even as the BJP amplified the mimicry row with the help of a pliant media and, unfortunately, even the Speaker of the Lok Sabha and chair of the Rajya Sabha.
Even as the mimicry row is being seen as an affront by Dhankhar and his Jat identity, the Union government has subverted the democratic functioning of the Parliament by bulldozing through parliamentary rules through its brute majority. It used its majority to put into effect the largest suspensions of MPs in the history of the Indian Parliament, and simultaneously evade accountability on the matter of security breach in the Lok Sabha.
Yet, when the opposition MPs attempted to subvert such autocracy through a humorous take by an MP, it has become the biggest talking point in India. Such misplaced priorities not only reflect the nature of the Union government but also the media which has unquestioningly fallen in line, even if it meant a steep fall in our parliamentary tradition.
In this regime, stand-up comics have been arrested, their shows have been cancelled, cartoonists are lampooned, while others, like Shyam Rangeela, who mimics Modi, have been booked by the police for his skits. This, when the BJP leaders heap one insult after another, indulge in one communal, lowly remark after another on critics and dissenters almost on a daily basis. The BJP has normalised the school bully, except that he has to be one of its own.
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