The demand by Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP Nishikant Dubey that the Congress’s Shashi Tharoor be removed as chairman of the 32-member Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology (IT) has once again placed the spotlight on the rapidly deteriorating relations between the government and the Opposition. Dubey has also moved a privilege motion against Tharoor.
If the refusal of Dubey – and his BJP colleagues who are on the IT panel – to sign the attendance register at a meeting called by Tharoor is certainly an obstructionist move, perhaps the latter erred in announcing the subject of the meeting on social media before he had shared it with the members of the committee he heads.
A less contentious agenda might have escaped the attention of the ruling party, but Tharoor had decided that the IT committee meeting scheduled for July 28 would be spent discussing citizens’ data protection and privacy. The committee also planned to question officials on the Pegasus spyware, the subject that has already brought Parliament to a virtual halt, with the government unwilling to discuss the matter on the floor of Parliament. France, Israel and Hungary, similarly affected by the use of Pegasus’s spyware, have ordered official investigations, but Union Parliamentary Affairs Minister Pralhad Joshi called the matter a “totally non-serious issue”; instead, he advised his colleagues on the Opposition benches to focus on people-centric subjects.