Current govt reduced Parliament to notice board, rubber stamp: Tharoor

The BJP government has successfully reduced Parliament to a "notice board and a rubber stamp", Congress MP Shashi Tharoor alleged at the Jaipur Literature Festival on Friday.

During a session titled "Sustaining Democracy; Nurturing Democracy", he claimed that tightening the already stringent Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) in a way that kept people like Siddique Kappan in jail for two years without bail is one of the many ways the current dispensation has "managed to depart from the democratic spirit of the Constitution".

The government has been able to take "a lot of autocratic steps without ever having to declare an emergency", the Thiruvananthapuram MP alleged, adding, "You can call this an undeclared emergency."
At the 16th edition of the literature festival, replying to a question about Parliament's ability to hold the government accountable, Tharoor said, "Under (Jawaharlal) Nehru, we had a parliament in which even ruling party members could challenge their prime minister, the minister of finance was forced to resign over a scandal exposed by backbenchers and we saw the prime minister held accountable to Parliament even during the 1962 China war."