Dear Express Reader A photograph in this paper on Friday, February 10, captured a winding queue of visitors waiting to enter Parliament during the Budget session. It was an emblematic freeze-frame in a week that saw Parliament come alive with a political joust that played inside the House, instead of, as it often does, shutting it down. On Tuesday, Rahul Gandhi, recently returned from the Kanya Kumari-to-Kashmir Bharat Jodo Yatra, made a spirited speech in Lok Sabha, raising the issue of the rise of the house of Adanis on the watch of Prime Minister Narendra Modi - the Adani Group has been at the centre of controversy ever since the publishing of the Hindenburg report, which accuses it of "brazen stock manipulation and accounting fraud schemes over the course of decades". On Wednesday and Thursday, PM Modi, in his reply to the Motion of Thanks on the President's address in both Houses, gave a combative response, though he did not name Rahul or the Adanis. A parliamentary standstill seemed rousingly broken. The day after the speeches flowed, came the expunging. A "major portion" of Rahul's speech was "removed in such a way that the whole speech … becomes unintelligible", Congress leader in Lok Sabha Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury wrote to Speaker Om Birla. And Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha and Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge raised the matter of his own remarks being expunged with RS chairman Jagdeep Dhankhar. Criticism of government, its policies and their impact "can never be equated with (lowering) the dignity of the Council", said Kharge. The parliamentary rules of procedure give presiding officers of both Houses discretion in removing words from the recorded proceedings that they deem "defamatory or indecent or unparliamentary or undignified". According to the Lok Sabha rule book, MPs should not "make personal reference by way of making an allegation imputing a motive to or questioning the bona fides of any other member of the House unless it be imperatively necessary for the purpose of the debate …". And yet, the extent and nature of the deletions in the two speeches seemed excessive. Among the remarks expunged from Kharge's speech, for instance, were these lines of verse, which were presumably read too literally: "Bada haseen hai unki zuban ka jaadu/Laga ke aag baharon ki baat karte hain". (Roughly translated: His speech is so seductive, he can light a fire and make it look beautiful). And in Rahul's speech, as many as 18 separate portions were snipped away. The protests by Chowdhury and Kharge point to an important distinction between legitimate criticism and irresponsible allegation in Parliament. How this distinction is made, where the red line is drawn, is especially crucial in times when rules and laws are wielded as blunt instruments to shrink spaces, both inside and outside the House, for the freedom to talk back to the powerful. PM Modi, in his own speech, sought to tar the Opposition's rhetoric as "aarop", not "aalochana", accusation, not criticism. Presiding officers in both Houses of Parliament, however, must surely be much more mindful of the dangers of a restrictive reading of the rule book. Because the nation's highest forum of debate must also be the widest. Meanwhile, listen to the two speeches again - the unexpunged Rahul Gandhi and the full-on Narendra Modi - to get an early glimpse of the grand face-off in 2024. For Rahul, together with the arduousness of the Bharat Jodo Yatra, the directness of his challenge to PM Modi in Parliament is part of a personal and political arc in a script he seems to be finally trying to take charge of. The Yatra's physical rigours and its "love vs hate" talk could be seen as a riposte to criticism that he is an entitled part-time politician who is reluctant to take on the BJP ideologically. The attempt to pin down the PM on the Adani issue is a bid to make the messaging more focused and specific. And yet, in between the abstractions that Rahul 2.0 played with during the Yatra and the pointed attack in Parliament, lies a bristling political agenda waiting to be claimed before 2024. Rahul still has to take the Yatra to his own party, and then join the dots to other Opposition parties willing to pool forces with it against the dominant BJP. He needs to stake out positions at the Ground Zeroes of difficult issues of nationalism and majoritarianism, on which the BJP is seen to set the agenda after spooking its opponents into evasiveness or silence. And to face up to the Congress's own record of ambivalence and hypocrisy on matters of individual liberty and institutional autonomy, which greatly hobbles its criticism of the BJP. In his new political incarnation, Rahul needs to widen his repertoire most of all because a focused attack on Modi can be a double-edged strategy. It helps Rahul to appear more purposeful, but it also gives Modi the opportunity to do what he does best - change the subject to Modi. More specifically, before-and-after-Modi. Nine years in power have not blurred the drama or tempered the starkness of that story. Modi, the Outsider, who took on a corrupt "eco system" and status quo. Creator of a New India after erasing all vestiges of the old. The hero in a saga of apocalyptic contrasts. Our editorial on the PM's Parliament speech pointed to his distinctive framing - "'the lost decade', 2004-2014, of corruption and unchecked terror strikes and 'policy paralysis' vs 'India's decade'. The latter, he said, was led by a stable government armed with a majority, which had made India a place of 'nayi sambhavnaayen' new possibilities, and 'vaishvik saakh' or global influence. A government that implemented reforms only under compulsion and converted every opportunity into crisis, 'mauka' to 'museebat', against a government that reforms by conviction and has given its people an array of firsts, from ensuring the spread of basic services to areas untouched by the state, to propelling the country into the digital age and to the global forefront across sectors and fronts." At the centre of it all, as the PM drew the image in Parliament this week, "one man outweighing so many", the people's mandate his "suraksha kavach" or shield. The Modi message gives no quarter to what and who has gone before. In the spotlight is a stark silhouette, with no supporting cast of characters. There is no mellowing of Moditva, and little room in it for humour or humility. Framed in Parliament, then, were the two sides taking positions ahead of 2024: One is on a patchy and incomplete journey. The other has arrived at a hard and unyielding place. Till next week, Vandita | 
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