A destructive madness seems to have seized members of both houses of Parliament elected at great expense by the people, to represent the popular will in the framing and enactment of laws by which the country is governed. Despite urgent legislation relating to the acquisition and compensation of land for industrial and urban expansion, and the passage of a national Goods and Services Tax Bill to create a national market and avoid double taxation required to be debated and finalised, the entire monsoon session of Parliament was washed out. No business was transacted because of continuous agitation and rowdyism in both houses of Parliament.
Although reduced to a tiny minority of less than 10 percent in the directly elected Lok Sabha (44 out of 543 members), the opposition Congress party refused to “let the house function” unless a Union minister and two state chief ministers — leaders of the ruling BJP/NDA alliance at the Centre — resigned their offices pending investigation of corruption charges.
During the failed monsoon session, the country’s tax-paying citizens incurred a loss aggregating Rs.260 crore due to the intemperate and unruly parliamentary conduct of Congress MPs. Secondly, it also needs to be noted that during the rule of the Congress-led UPA II government (2009-14), BJP MPs indulging in similar disruptive behaviour wiped out not one, but several sessions of Parliament.
This is the backdrop against which at the fag end of the nihilistic monsoon session, some 15,000 captains of industry and leaders in other walks of life including academia, made an online appeal to MPs cutting across party lines to allow Parliament to “function, debate and legislate”. Curiously instead of prompting introspection, this perfectly sensible admonition and advice to the peoples’ representatives provoked vituperative reactions from some MPs, particularly of the Congress and the communist parties. In a threatening tone, Congress’ Manish Tewari warned India Inc against advising MPs how to manage the country. Likewise, CPM’s Sitaram Yechury advocated that captains of industry who signed the petition be taken to task.
Such threats to India Inc are a hangover from the bad old days of licence-permit-quota raj when the Central and state governments — and bully politicians — could throw a spanner in the works of any company. Despite liberalisation, wide residuary powers have been retained by government to harass corporate India. Leaders of the BJP and Congress who have reduced Parliament to a theatre of the absurd need to become aware that India Inc, which produces the goods and services the public needs, has a legitimate right to protest when important legislation in the national interest is stymied because of juvenile politics practised in Parliament.
In the circumstances, the India Inc petition to MPs to get their act together and cease and desist from committing contempt of Parliament should be welcomed and supported by all right-thinking members of society.
Ban online porn in under-developed india
The central government’s swift reversal of the ban imposed upon 857 pornographic websites in early August following a hue and cry about ‘moral policing’ raised by some disconnected liberals, needs to be forthrightly condemned. It’s vacillation of the worst sort for which the Narendra Modi-led BJP/NDA government at the Centre is rapidly losing the confidence of the electorate, which voted it to power with a massive majority in the summer of 2014.
The arguments advanced by liberals opposing the proscription of online pornography are that it infringes the fundamental right of freedom of speech of internet service providers to beam porn and the right of adults to view such content in the privacy of their homes. These arguments are spurious because unlike the US Constitution in which the freedom of speech is an absolute, unqualified right, under the Constitution of India, the freedom of speech is subject to reasonable restrictions in the public interest.
Therefore given that pornography is provenly connected with modern slavery, trafficking in women, intimidation and forced labour and can unhinge minds and create entire communities of sexual predators — especially true of societies plagued with widespread illiteracy — banning broadcast of porn websites is self-evidently a reasonable restriction in the public interest. Moreover, there’s no guarantee that smut, allowed to be broadcast freely on the internet, will only be viewed by adults.
The second argument advanced by pro-porn liberals is that given the magnitude of content generated online and the ubiquity of the ICT (information communication technologies) global revolution, it’s impossible to prevent thousands of websites from transmitting objectionable content online. This argument is also flawed because it’s based on the presumed inability of the State to prevent, rather than punish, crime. On the contrary, in such situations the State needs to muster all resources and energy to deter heinous crimes through rigorous prosecution and exemplary punishment of offenders.
It’s all very well for comfy liberals (such as novelist Chetan Bhagat) to pretend that under-educated and cognitively under-developed India is on a par with Western democracies, and can afford to make the fine distinction between private enjoyment of porn and acceptable public conduct. Yet Indian society’s pernicious corruption, tolerance of deep social inequalities, lynch-mob justice and appreciation of simpleton cinema, is testimony to cognitive under-development.
Therefore, the Indian State should make plain its abhorrence of the production and broadcast of pornography which — as is becoming increasingly manifest in ‘advanced’ Western democracies where private enjoyment of porn has degenerated into widespread child abuse — has the capability of further perverting the minds and public conduct of Indian citizens.