"The disruption we have started in this session will be taken to the people till we are able to restore fairness and some degree of accountability," the Opposition MP said. “If parliamentary accountability is subverted and a debate is intended to be used merely to put a lid on parliamentary accountability, it is then a legitimate tactic for the Opposition to expose the government through the parliamentary instruments available at its command.”
Challenged about him and his colleagues failing to do the work they were sent to Parliament for, he was indignant. “Disrupting does not mean not doing work. What we are doing is, in fact, very important work.” Asked whether Parliament should not be used to debate rather than disrupt, the Opposition MP replied: “Sometimes, disruptions bring greater gains to the country.”
No, these are not lines from one of the dozen Rajya Sabha MPs suspended this week for the rest of the Winter Session of Parliament, whose expulsion from proceedings that they had not disrupted has plunged Parliament into crisis.
They were instead spoken by the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) own late Arun Jaitley, during the chaotic 2011-13 period, when the BJP paralysed session after session clamouring for ministerial resignations, for a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) on telecoms spectrum allocations, and for probes into various alleged misdemeanours of the UPA Government.