Views from a JUDGE

Book review of 'Inside Parliament: Views from the Front Row'

Inside Parliament 

Views from the Front Row

Derek O’Brien

HarperCollins

198 pages; Rs 499

Sitaram Yechury, the general secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), retired from the Rajya Sabha in August. Bahujan Samaj Party president Mayawati quit the House in protest in July, and dissident Janata Dal (United) leader Sharad Yadav faces disqualification from the House after opposing Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s decision to align with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

This, in the forthcoming winter session of Parliament, leaves Derek O’Brien, Trinamool Congress leader in the Rajya Sabha, as the foremost voice of regional parties and the non-Congress Opposition in the upper House. Mr O’Brien made his Rajya Sabha debut in 2011, and was elected to a second term this August. Before entering politics, the 56-year-old was a widely-known quizmaster and best-selling author of quiz books.

In the Rajya Sabha, Mr O’Brien has taken his time to grow in confidence and earn the respect of his colleagues. If his speeches would leave his colleagues bemused with their word play and sense of humour earlier, he has learnt to employ his knack for language to greater effect when he speaks on burning issues.

Some of his House speeches, particularly after demonetisation, have been widely viewed on social media. It has helped that his party chief, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, has shed her strategy of equidistance with the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party and striven to take the leadership role within the Opposition space. Mr O’Brien has shown himself to be capable of being his leader’s voice in the national capital.

Mr O’Brien has had good mentors, some of whom he acknowledges publicly, and some others whom he cannot. In the former category is senior Congress leader P Chidambaram, while in the latter is CPI (M)’s Mr Yechury. In turn, Mr O’Brien has emerged as a mentor for younger leaders in other political parties, particularly those handling social media. He has had no small role to play in effecting the changed social media narrative against the Modi government.

This book is a collection of 46 essays and opinion pieces, written for news websites or his Facebook page. “I’m not an expert on every subject under the Delhi sun — other than news television anchors, nobody is,” Mr. O’Brien, who had started his career as a journalist and moved on to advertising, cautions the reader in the introduction.

He sticks another knife, and with some justification, into the “so called” “national media”. He says he has long felt that this “national media” – “and this is a belief confirmed after six years in the Rajya Sabha – is incapable of understanding reality beyond central and south Delhi. And maybe the tony parts of Gurugram and Noida.” His essay, “Surviving TV channels that are government mouthpieces” is a sorry but apt commentary on the state of the Indian media.

Some of his essays are a lament to the erosion of India’s pluralism, but also a call to arms to save it. The O’Brien family is well known in Kolkata. “We lived on a street named after a Muslim (Jamir Lane). We are a Christian family. That is the India I know. That is the only India I want to know. Let no one ever try to destroy this. Marginalised or not marginalised, nobody must destroy this. We will get together to GST: Grow Strong Together,” he says.

The Trinamool has been at the forefront in criticising demonetisation and the way GST was rolled out. In one essay, he praises the lead Ms Banerjee took in opposing the note ban, purely based on her gut instinct when other Opposition leaders were too scared. Some of the more readable essays in this volume are: “A true leader forgets no one” — his ode to Ms Banerjee’s leadership; “Why I cannot discuss the CPI (M) calmly”, on the “havoc” the Left wrought on Bengal; and “Rumour Spreading Society (RSS) and BJP playing with fire”.

Mr O’Brien believes the BJP can be stopped in 2019. Alluding to the alleged irregularities in BJP chief Amit Shah’s son Jay’s business dealings, he writes that “from Jai Ho to Jay Woe”, the BJP’s “son stroke” has meant that the party’s anti-corruption narrative is struggling. To defeat the BJP in 2019, he suggests a three-step approach.

First, the next Lok Sabha elections should not be a contest between Modi and a single alternative candidate. Instead, it should be a sum of state elections to make Modi and BJP fight 29 different regional elections focusing on the issues of the individual states. Second, strong state leaders have defeated BJP, whether it is Ms Banerjee in Bengal, or Naveen Patnaik in Odisha, and even Amarinder Singh in Punjab, and Siddaramaiah in Karnataka could do the same in the Assembly polls in May 2018.

Third, he says the 2019 should be an election where people are asked to “JUDGE” the BJP government’s record on: Jobs and their absence; Underperformance — a hallmark of governance since 2014; demonetisation, the GST; and the Economy. Mr O’Brien warns that the Opposition has to be disciplined in not falling into BJP’s trap to divert attention with a “fake narrative” around polarising issues of “beef, pseudo-nationalism or some such prime time, made-for-TV-and-Twitter agenda.”