Jaitley invokes Nehru to prevent 'washout' of winter session

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Monday apprehended a ‘washout’ of the current winter session of Parliament and invoked Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru to remind the Congress of the responsibility of members of Parliament to govern the country through the House.

'The last session of Parliament did not function. The current session is also threatened with a washout. The reasons for the washout of the current session keep changing by the hour,' Jaitley wrote on Facebook 

'The nation is waiting for Parliament to discuss public issues, to legislate and approve a historic Constitution amendment enabling the goods and services tax. All this is being indefinitely delayed. The question we need to ask ourselves is are we being fair to ourselves and this country?' he posted.

The finance minister also quoted a speech on the parliamentary system by Pandit Nehru to hammer home his point.

He said that the speech delivered on March 28, 1957 on the last day of the first Lok Sabha by Nehru is 'a must read for all of us'.

He quoted a paragraph from the speech in which Nehru had said, 'Here, we have sat in this Parliament, the sovereign authority of India, responsible for the governance of India. Surely, there can be no higher responsibility or greater privilege than to be a member of this sovereign body which is responsible for the fate of the vast number of human beings who live in this country. All of us, if not always, at any rate from time to time, must have felt this high sense of responsibility and destiny to which we had been called. Whether we were worthy of it or not is another matter. We have functioned, therefore, during these five years not only on the edge of history but sometimes plunging into the processes of making history.'

Taking a dig at the Congress over frequent disruptions in the Rajya Sabha, Jaitley said, "Those who claim the legacy of Panditji must ask themselves the question, what kind of history are they making."