The impasse in the Rajya Sabha has blown over courtesy a brokered truce in which both the NDA government and the Congress backed off from stridently stated positions. Yet, as subsequent events in Parliament painfully projected that “truce” was trivial, superficial and has not even obliquely addressed a pathetic situation in which the political discourse has degenerated from rhetoric to vicious personal abuse ~ as exemplified by Rahul Gandhi dubbing the finance minister as “Jaitlie”. Even going to the extent of ridiculing the terms of the agreement which restored a semblance of peace to the Upper House.

It is true that ministers, of any government, bear an added responsibility for keeping the “debate” decorous, but the head of what claims to be the principal Opposition party is also required to “play ball”. Alas, such dec­ency has disappeared from the political arena and the more denigrating the comment the more effective it is presumed to be. The pointlessness of the Rajya Sabha “accord” is heightened by the mistaken belief that only in the legislature’s chambers does the concept of “parliamentary” conduct have relevance: it is silly to expect dignified language from those who use fish-market terminology elsewhere. Parliament’s greatest quality is that it mirrors the political scenario, scary though that image may be.

The terms of the “truce” rightly draw attention to both sides making sweeping statements, wild allegations and what have you during election campaigns. For that is where the rot begins. The lust for power “justifies” seeking it using means foul rather than fair, and while everyone talks of a development agenda in reality the accent is on polarising the electorate on religious, community or caste lines ~ the new meaning of “divide and rule”. The reality is that all the nice words used by Arun Jaitley and Ghulam Nabi Azad in their compromise solution will fade away as soon as the next election is announced. Which could even be a municipal poll, since the squabble for power has no lower limit.

While the government claims that Mr Narendra Modi’s comments against Dr Manmohan Singh and Mr Mohd Hamid Ansari were erroneously interpreted out of context, most people are “clued up” enough to know that injecting a Pakistan angle into the Gujarat poll was a way of consolidating the Hindu vote. Similarly the Congress’ distancing itself from Mani Shankar Aiyar’s distasteful remark is meaningless unless the party goes the distance and expels him ~ and not merely because it was directed against Mr Modi and had a negative impact on the party’s poll prospects.

In the same way a junior minister for parliamentary affairs’ bid to distance the government from Anantkumar Hegde’s ridiculing the concept of secularism and threatening to re-write the Constitution is hardly convincing. The sum total of all these comments confirms that contemporary politics have truly reached a nadir.