Vivek Tankha writes to Dhankar: All is not ‘well’ in temple of democracy

New Delhi: Expressing his displeasure over Rajya Sabha Chairman Jagdish Dhankar’s ‘transgressor’ remark, Congress MP Vivek Tankha said that the Chairman’s apathy for members walking into the Well of the House is well known.

In a letter to Rajya Sabha Chairman, Congress MP said, “Our biggest challenge is our failure to do justice to the people of India through our parliamentary process. The parliamentary logjam and impasse of the last many years and sessions is a grim reminder of our national failure.”

Tankha, who is a noted lawyer, further said, “Though in the past, this transgression was accepted by the past Chairpersons as a ‘voice of dissent’ in a democracy, but under your stewardship, the conduct of entering the Well has been deprecated as an ‘unparliamentary’ practice.”

“So when the entire Opposition in Rajya Sabha walked into the Well of the House last Wednesday, as a protest to Piyush Goyal’s comment that ‘all of the opposition MPs (INDIA alliance) are traitors’, he noticed Vivek Tankha amongst others. In his closing speech Dhankar named him as ‘transgressor’,” the Congress leader said in his letter to the Chairman.

“Sir, in your anguish you named me as a ‘transgressor’ in your address. But the solution lies in addressing the larger ‘disease’ and not in just ‘castigating’ the symptom,” Tankha added.

He further pointed out that as many as five sessions of Parliament have ended in a logjam, costing a huge sum of the exchequer’s money. “A non-functional Parliament might find favour with leadership, but never with MPs, who lose all their relevance in a nonfunctional Parliament.”

“It shows that all is not well if the temple of democracy is subjected to logjam session after session. It’s certainly not in order where bills are passed in the absence of any debate and taxpayers money is spent in maintaining a behemoth and allowances to its members,” he said.