National interest is supreme
It is increasingly becoming clear that the opposition parties do not study the bills before voting. This is especially so in the Rajya Sabha. There cannot be herd mentality while voting. Each Rajya Sabha member is supposed to be an expert in some field or the other. They are intelligent and can think for themselves. If not, why are they in the Rajya Sabha? All members of the Rajya Sabha should vote positively with any specific objections. Otherwise, it is like uneducated persons voting or educated government employees sitting for dharna against the government. What is the logic? It is easy to vote blindly without doing any groundwork. Do the Rajya Sabha members consider party to be above the country? We are seeing the result of such thinking. Can the Rajya Sabha members do not see these? We, the people of India, request(which shouldn’t be called for, in an ideal scenario) the Rajya Sabha members of all parties to vote what is good for the country. People of India have reposed confidence in both Houses of Parliament. The members of the Upper House are to note that the progress of the country need not be progress of the party. They should take heed of the President’s address to the nation at the beginning of the ongoing Budget session. People of India have suffered for almost 10 years now, since we had a government that was not interested in the progress of the country. We do not know yet know what was was their agenda. But we are sure that we don’t want a repeat of it.
Raghunath Rao, Mumbai
BJP’s troubles
Apropos of your edit “Exposing the opposition” (February 26), it would have been very easy had BJP taken its alliance partners on board for the changes to the land law. The fissure in the NDA shows that no calibrated strategy was worked out. Far from taking along the opposition, particularly Congress chief ministers who had had voiced misgivings and wanted changes in the Land Act—which is precisely what the NDA had set out to do—the way NDA was attacked by the combined opposition shows somewhere the BJP took its allies for granted. The Land Act is giving NDA an anti-farmer image. The most bizarre example of this is acquiring land for the new capital of Andhra Pradesh. Land Acquisition Act (2013) also requires a Social Impact Assessment to be performed; Acquisition of such land is prohibited under Section 10 of the Land Acquisition Act, 2013, even for public purposes. Unless the Land Act is amended, the difficulties in getting land will stall all projects and it is debatable whether the NDA will, under the circumstances, perform better that UPA.
MM Gurbaxani, Bangalore
