If they clashed in the past, today they concurred — their divide sweetened by sugar.
Two women, whose “jugalbandhis” in Parliament from opposing sides of the divide used to be the staple of news stories, were in sync as they held forth against “cheeni samrat” Sharad Pawar.
Brinda Karat and Sushma Swaraj both railed against the rise in food prices as the House debated the spiral that has sparked protests across India
It wasn’t so even a few months back when Brinda’s party, the CPM, used to back the Congress-led coalition to ward off “communal forces”.
As one of the BJP’s star speakers, Sushma never passed up a chance to hit out at the CPM. Brinda’s responses were sometimes as sharp as Sushma’s comments. Both were then Rajya Sabha MPs.
But circumstances have changed since then. Her party no longer supports the Congress. It gave a new edge to her speech in the Rajya Sabha today. Nearly metres away in the Lok Sabha, Sushma was making her debut as the leader of the Opposition leader and had to prove she was second to none.
Sushma and Brinda both spoke in Hindi. Sushma used the BJP’s Sanskritised brand and threw in an occasional English word or phrase. Brinda sounded slightly more colloquial. But both made the same point.
If Sushma dubbed Pawar, the food, agriculture and consumer affairs minister, as a “cheeni samrat” (sugar monarch), Brinda insinuated that most sugar and foodgrain factories in Maharashtra were owned by politicians who diverted their produce for alcohol manufacture. “Those who want to drink, let them drink, but please don’t do this in the interest of food security,” she said.
She also accused the government of selling sugar at a subsidy to chocolate companies.
Sushma said that instead of creating buffer stocks of sugar when cane production was booming, the government started exports and imports simultaneously with a curious sale-purchase mismatch.
Sugar was exported for a song and imported for a price, she alleged. The country lost money but some people had benefited from the “artificial” shortage, she said, wondering why listed sugar companies showed a 300-fold hike in profits over the period concerned.
Brinda also accused the government of playing politics with wheat. Sushma said there were “major scams” in the trade of wheat, lentils and wheat flour.
Both demanded a joint parliamentary committee be set up to investigate the “ghaplas” (scams). So was the display of “miley sur Sushma, Brinda kaa” (the synchronisation of tunes) the first sign of an Opposition unity?
A BJP leader emphatically denied that a debate could revive the atmosphere of the late eighties when the BJP and the Left came together to corner the Congress.
“The secular-communal breach stands. Even today Mulayam Singh Yadav brought up the Babri issue. As long as these non-Congress constituents pander to their Muslim voters, we can’t have a meaningful alliance outside Parliament, Congress or no Congress,” he said.
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