Sena, Congress ruckus on trust vote misplaced
The desperation of the Congress and the Shiv Sena manifested itself in an ugly way during the vote of confidence which the Devendra Fadnavis Government secured in Maharashtra Assembly on November 12. Members of these parties created a needless ruckus, stormed into the well of the House and constantly heckled Governor Ch Vidyasagar Rao.
A bunch of Congress legislators even roughed up the Governor which left the latter injured. These are despicable acts and a blot on the country’s democratic credentials. Whatever the grievances the Shiv Sena and the Congress had, nothing can justify their conduct. Having lost the election fair and square to the Bharatiya Janata Party, it appears that they have decided to adopt a confrontationist posture in a bid to make the Fadnavis Government’s life miserable. Sadly for them, the strategy will not work and the people who are already disillusioned will drift away further from them.
There was nothing but infamy to be gained — and that has come — by the disruptionist tactics of the Sena and the Congress. At the core of their anger is that Assembly Speaker Haribhau Bagde did not put to division the motion of trust moved by the Government, but allowed it to be adopted through a voice vote. There is nothing in the rules of business of the House that mandates a vote of confidence to go through a division, unless such division is asked for by the members before the confidence vote is taken up by voice vote. In other words, had the members of the Congress and the Shiv Sena demanded a division before the voice vote, the Speaker would have been obliged to take that course.
But on Wednesday, the demand came after the trust motion was placed for a voice vote. In any case, it is not as if the Shiv Sena or the Congress believed that the Fadnavis Government would have lost the vote had there been a division. They knew that the 13-day old regime would have easily secured the confidence of the House, with direct or tacit help of the Nationalist Congress Party, which has extended ‘outside and unconditional’ support to the BJP Government. Therefore, the entire drama they enacted had no purpose other than to grab headlines and precious television prime time.
It is being argued that the Fadnavis Government could have avoided the controversy from the start by making it clear that it would like to secure the confidence of the House through a division of votes; after all, it had the numbers to easily sail through. That may be so, but then neither the Government nor the others had expected the opposition parties to stoop to the level of street-tactics to make their point. It is obvious they had decided that, come what may, they would disrupt the House proceedings. Meanwhile, if, for a moment, one keeps aside the unsavoury chaos engineered by the opposition parties, the verbal attacks by the Congress and the Shiv Sena provided comic relief.
While the former called the episode a “murder of democracy” and a “black day”, the Sena said the Government had won the confidence vote through “unconstitutional” means. Both are talking through their hats, and they know it — just as the people do. Given that the Shiv Sena is still part of the NDA at the Centre and there exists the possibility of its patch-up with the BJP, it ought to have been more circumspect.