Dear Express Reader Parliament concluded its Winter session early this week, having sat for 13 days. It was one of the shortest sessions in the 17th Lok Sabha - according to PRS Legislative Research, eight out of 10 sessions of the 17th Lok Sabha have adjourned early. A look at the data also tells us that this is part of a longer and larger decline, and not all attributable to Covid or to the current set of political actors: The number of sittings of Parliament has, over the decades, halved since the 1950s and 1960s. But on some counts, the fading of Parliament as a forum of debate and accountability has to do directly with its present-day predicament. Due legislative diligence has plunged sharply - the number of bills introduced and passed in the same session in the 17th Lok Sabha has shot up to 72 per cent, from 43 per cent in the 16th Lok Sabha, and 32 per cent in the 15th. Only 23 per cent of the bills introduced have been referred to committees, lower than the last three Lok Sabhas - 60 per cent in the 14th Lok Sabha, 71 per cent in the 15th, and 27 per cent in the 16th. After this Winter Session, the government is claiming productivity in terms of bills passed, but the Opposition is pointing to the discussions not had, including on the Chinese incursion in Tawang. Of course, the government is being too clever by only counting the Bills pushed through, and the Opposition is right to call out the silences in the House. It is also true that government is much more to blame than the Opposition for Parliament receding from public view - since the government calls the shots. And yet, the denuding of Parliament points to wider complicities. This week, the Bharat Jodo Yatra reached the national capital, and paused for a break. The government has spent thousands of crores to defame him and sully his image, said Rahul Gandhi. But "I showed you the truth in a month" he said. In his speeches from the Bharat Jodo Yatra, Rahul Gandhi has also talked about things larger than himself. But while his accusations about the BJP's targeting of him are sharp, his rhetoric on the alternative he offers - the politics of love versus the politics of hate - has been mostly non-specific. It need not have been so. Just in recent days, there were instances Rahul Gandhi could have used to illustrate his argument - on Friday, the Bajrang Dal disrupted namaz in an open ground in Gurgaon again. Also on Friday, in UP's Bareilly, a shiksha mitra, who along with a school principal, was booked after students recited a prayer written by Iqbal during the morning assembly, was arrested and sacked by the UP education department - an FIR had been lodged on the complaint of a VHP functionary on Wednesday. And in Jharkhand, an inter-faith love story that ended in tragedy is being taken over by a familiar politics of prejudice and polarisation, as in the Shraddha Walkar case. The dots can be joined between the discussions that-weren't in the prematurely concluded session of Parliament, the hate-filled incidents in Gurgaon, UP and Jharkhand, and Rahul Gandhi's non-specific rhetoric during his Yatra. Despite its terrible diminishment, Congress is the main party of the Opposition and the Yatra is the first time it has taken to the streets in a big way, if you don't count election campaigns - or going by its inertness in Gujarat, even if you include its election-time activity. And yet, so far, the Yatra has bypassed an important election, skirted the hate and intolerance on the ground, and stopped short of Parliament. Just as Rahul Gandhi did not need to walk through Gujarat to speak to the voter in that state, he could have used the Yatra to draw attention to the ebbing life in Parliament. The Congress's mobilisation because of the Yatra could have resonated in this Parliament session directly or indirectly. That this did not happen points to the limits of the Congress's message amid its most energetic mobilisation in recent times. It also bodes unhappy things for Parliament. On the one hand, the Prime Minister graces it only with an erratic presence, and on the other, the main Opposition leader does not claim its space as his own. A rather sobering note on which to wish you a merry Christmas, dear reader. Till the new year, Vandita | 
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