Renuka Chowdhury, SS Ahluwalia

New Delhi, Dec. 6: If you think the pandemonium and paralysis at Parliament is unparalleled and regret that all work has been stalled, don’t expect all MPs to agree.

BJP member S.S. Ahluwalia, for instance, argues that Parliament is “more orderly” than it was two decades ago. And there are those who claim that a crippled House has left them with more time to devote to their other official responsibilities as MPs.

Ahluwalia, the Rajya Sabha MP whose decibel level makes Congress members wish they carried earmuffs, was in the Congress in the 1980s and was part of Rajiv Gandhi’s “screaming brigade” in the Upper House.

He says that in 1988, Renuka Chowdhury, then in the Telugu Desam Party, was more than a match for him. “She nearly assaulted Rajiv once in the House and threw papers at him,” he recalled.

Those days the Opposition, a small minority in the Lok Sabha but respectably placed in the Rajya Sabha, had started a belligerent campaign on the Bofors controversy.

Renuka supplied the brawn, so to speak, while S. Jaipal Reddy and K.P. Unnikrishnan, Lok Sabha MPs from the Janata Party, were the brain. Renuka had Murasoli Maran (DMK) and Gurudas Dasgupta (CPI) for company.

“Together, they ensured that both Houses were paralysed. I was part of the counter brigade — and please don’t say ‘shouting brigade’ — with Jayanthi Natarajan, Suresh Pachauri and V. Narayanaswamy. But we were silenced,” Ahluwalia recalled.

“It was a bad dream,” he added with a shudder.

Ahluwalia, therefore, claims that despite the widespread belief that politics has deteriorated irreparably, the state of affairs is “actually more orderly”.

He said: “All we’ve done is place a democratic demand for a JPC. We have not beaten up anybody.”

Other MPs claim that although the Houses have seen hardly any work during the month-old winter session, they have been working as usual, or harder.

“I am in Parliament from 10am till 5.30pm. I attend to my work on the various committees I am on,” said Basudev Acharya of the CPM.

Acharya, sounding passionate about the agriculture committee he chairs, said he was close to finalising a report on genetically modified foods.

The adjournments have proved a blessing, allowing him to hold five back-to-back meetings with the various stakeholders, and he says he hopes to wrap up the process with four more next week.

Those like Faizabad MP Nirmal Khatri have kept themselves gainfully employed in other ways. Khatri is the great-nephew of the renowned Uttar Pradesh socialist, Acharya Narendra Dev, and is regarded as one of the Congress’s paddha-likha (educated) members.

These days, he has forsaken the Economic and Political Weekly for the Open magazine in Parliament’s library to catch up on follow-up stories on the Niira Radia tapes.

On a more serious note, Khatri said he was using his time to chase down ministers and get his constituency work done.

“There’s a lot of writing work, petitions, follow-up letters. But things get done faster than usual. I find the social sector ministries especially co-operative.”

Sonia Gandhi, too, doesn’t leave immediately when the House is adjourned. She has been staying back till noon in her room on the ground floor of Parliament, where she has been mostly meeting MPs and MLAs from trouble spot Andhra Pradesh.

Occasionally, she stops for a while in the Central Hall if a “Ramu Kaka” (the Congress’s moniker for Gandhi family retainers) invites her to a cup of tea.

The Prime Minister almost always leaves for his South Block office after the House is adjourned.

Rahul Gandhi, however, has made himself so scarce after the Congress’s Bihar debacle that he even missed the ritualistic year-end photo session for Lok Sabha members.

Bhagalpur MP Shahnawaz Hussain of the BJP has been dividing his time between work and fun.

Fun means catching up on the political “chit-chat”, which he had missed during a long spell campaigning in Bihar, at the Central Hall over coffee, tea and fish cutlets.

When he gets sick of the fare, he calls his friends over to his residence, barely a kilometre from Parliament, for gup-shup over chai and pakoras.

Work means boning up on the day’s events so that he doesn’t trip up if asked to address the media. But the Parliament library is not his favourite resource place.

“Library? In this day and age? I use the Net on my laptop. The library’s only for the comrades,” he said.

That’s largely true because, while almost every Left MP is a library regular, few others are except the DMK and AIADMK members.

“The reason I like the Parliament library is that the cubicles give me complete privacy,” said the CPI’s D. Raja.

As the footfall in the library becomes thinner, a veteran employee wondered if any MP, unless he or she is from the Left, would care to check out the answers diligently proffered to the starred and un-starred questions that are listed every day.

The questions — forwarded to the ministries concerned two weeks before Parliament meets — have to be replied to compulsorily and are tucked away for posterity in the records, irrespective of whether Parliament works or not.

“Hidden away in the answers are gems. A casual query can coax a commitment out of a minister that will have to be honoured,” the official said.

The Question Hour was important for another reason. A starred question can be followed up with supplementaries. The truth often comes out in the answers to the supplementaries that have cornered many a waffling or evasive minister. This session, the nation is being denied this privilege, courtesy its lawmakers.

But even when the House functions, it’s not all work and no play. Parliament begins at 11am and breaks for lunch at 1pm for an hour unless there is an urgent deadline for passing a bill or wrapping up a discussion.

This means that MPs who have their bungalows nearby can have their lunch at home and even steal a short nap before they return to the House. Many others use the canteen that serves wholesome food at subsidised prices.

There is no tea break but many MPs casually stroll out for tea or to smoke in designated nooks and corners. When they feel bored, they chill out in the Central Hall.

The only grouse of the Central Hall regulars is that these days, it is peopled with journalists and former MPs.

“The former are always looking to extract information from us without giving away anything. Looks like they have become wary after the Radia disclosures. The latter have nothing to give except for faded remembrances,” said a member.