Whichever way you view it, the past fortnight has been terrible. A national Budget passed without any meaningful discussion, the asides of Mani Shankar Aiyar on Savarkar elevated to national policy, a chief minister forced to resign and then jailed for a 10-year-old political case involving the hoisting of the national flag, and the prime minister charged with being discourteous to an Opposition delegation. Add to the list the soaring rate of inflation, the rash of strikes, the unattended fires in the North-east, the humiliation at Athens, and you may even appreciate the delicious irony behind MPs being lectured on democracy by a Communist Speaker whose party swears by Stalin.
That there is something rotten in the state of India is increasingly apparent. Manmohan Singh may not have been wilfully rude to the NDA delegation that called on him but he was undeniably curt and irritable. Who can blame him? Since being nominated to the top job by Sonia Gandhi, the prime minister hasn't had the luxury of a political honeymoon. With crisis accompanying crisis and the attacks on him getting more and more shrill, it is sometimes easy to forget that the shy and self-effacing economist has been in office for just 100 days. And, apart from moving house from Safdarjung Road to Race Course Road and being photographed doing a namaste to Master Vadra, he has very little to show by way of achievement. The poor man wasn't even accorded the privilege of making an intervention on the Budget in the Lok Sabha.
No wonder he appears frazzled. In his place, Indira Gandhi would have been downright offensive. She may even have refused to meet the Opposition leaders.
On its part, both the body language and the rhetoric of the Opposition suggest it is going for the jugular. The campaign of disruption and boycott of Parliament may have begun on the tainted ministers issue but its scope has been enlarged so much that no one remembers why it began in the first place. L K Advani, for example, in an interview to Aaj Tak on August 28, suggested the problem had something to do with the attitude of the government, its arrogance and its belief that the Opposition is extraneous to democracy. These are important observations but the problem in Parliament didn't begin with a set of attitudinal skirmishes. It centred on a concrete issue and then meandered its way to cover other areas.
For reasons that aren't entirely convincing, the BJP has moved from playing the conventional Opposition role to declaring war on the government. It has gone against the instincts of its middle-class base -- indeed, alienated them -- and injected extra-parliamentary boisterousness into parliamentary democracy.
By upping the stakes so high, the BJP may be guilty of political adventurism. Despite the growing unease with the UPA government's performance, particularly the downward slide of the economy, there is absolutely no evidence that the public mood has turned to anger. Manmohan Singh's honeymoon with the electorate may have been non-existent or remarkably short-lived, but that does not imply that the people have initiated divorce proceedings. Unless something cataclysmic happens, three months is just too short a time for a radical U-turn