TMC firebrand leader Mahua Moitra has been expelled from the Lok Sabha. A report prepared by the Ethics Committee of the Lok Sabha concluded that there was ample evidence to suggest that Moitra bent the rules of the house in exchange for benefits. Apart from her expulsion, the report also recommends a criminal probe against Moitra.
In the end, it is safe to say that Mahua Moitra has been burned at the stake. But desire as she might, she won’t be hailed by history as the Joan of Arc of politics.
To have earned that sobriquet Moitra would have to be seen to have sacrificed herself for higher principles. Opportunism, while a virtue in politics, isn’t a high principle in the grander ethical scheme of things.
Many say that blinding ambition got the better of Moitra. Burning with a desire to distinguish herself quickly on the political stage, she made one compromise too many.
While it is true that the world expects Parliamentarians to be compromised, there’s a class of ethical transgressions that’s a strict no-no in electoral politics. One of them is that a Parliamentarian must never breach the trust a voter places in their representative.
In a democracy, a Parliamentarian is the voice of the people. The voters expect their MP to ask questions on their behalf or raise their concerns in the cradle of democracy in the hope that life-altering redressal will follow.
But Moitra is indicted for supposedly accepting cash and gifts from industrialist Darshan Hiranandani in exchange for providing him access to her Parliament login. The businessman used the access to post questions on Moitra’s behalf against the Adani Group and its alleged link to the Prime Minister. This issue arguably mattered more to Moitra — as it was allegedly furthering her interests — than to her voters.
Moitra has not denied hypothecating the voters’ rights by sharing her login with the businessman, rather she claims that everyone does it.
That can hardly be a defence. And the committee did well to disregard Moitra’s attempt at whataboutery.
There’s probably some truth in the claim that the BJP wanted most to make an example of Moitra to warn other Opposition MPs against trying to play “dissident”. Moitra, after all, took pride in being the most vocal and brazen critic of the Modi government. Somewhere perhaps she became a caricature of herself believing in her cause so much that she forgot that the means (exposing an alleged nexus between PM Modi and Business Czar Adani) don’t always justify the ends.
Self-styled guardians of morality must never forget that they will be held to higher ethical standards than others.
Mahua clearly thought she was above being judged by the same standard she chose to judge her rivals.
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