For the second year in a row, an Opposition-sponsored amendment to the Motion of Thankson the President’s Address has been adopted bythe Rajya Sabha. Last year, the Motion of Thanks

was amended on the issue of black money; this week, theamendment focussed on legislation passed by BharatiyaJanata Party governments in Rajasthan and Haryana lim-iting the rights of citizens to contest panchayat elections.Before 2015, there were just three occasions on which thePresident’s Address was amended in the Rajya Sabha,once each during the tenures of Indira Gandhi, V.P. Singhand Atal Bihari Vajpayee. The President’s Address setsout a government’s policies and programmes, and is firstapproved by the Union Cabinet. Should an amendmentto the Address be carried through in the Lok Sabha, thegovernment would have to resign. There is, of course, nosuch obligation in the Rajya Sabha, but it is still seen toundermine the government’s ability at consensus-build-ing. For the members of the Rajya Sabha, it is a way to givenotice that they cannot be taken for granted. It is there-fore not just an embarrassment for the BJP-led NationalDemocratic Alliance government to have faced this sit-uation twice less than halfway through its five-year term.It also hints at the ruling party’s failure to reach out to theOpposition and forge a working consensus on the legisla-tive agenda. With its clear majority in the Lok Sabha, theBJP may feel unencumbered by the need for floor man-agement of the sort that ruling coalitions have had towork at over the past couple or decades — this week’svote shows that its lack of numbers in the Rajya Sabhadoes in fact demand an inventive outreach to the Opposi-tion if it wants support on important Bills in the UpperHouse.

The first instance of such an amendment to the Motionof Thanks came in 1980 on the issue of engineering defec-tions. The second was in 1989, when six amendments —including on the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid dis-pute and the India-Sri Lanka accord — were approved.The third occasion was in 2001, when the House adoptedan amendment on the sale of a public sector undertaking,Balco, to a private company. These were all politicallycontentious issues. So was the issue on which the Oppo-sition parties mobilised themselves this year, and it rais-es vital questions for democracy. Imposing curbs on whomay contest panchayat elections based on requirementsof educational qualifications and having toilets in homeseffectively cuts the underprivileged out of the fray. TheBJP could plead helplessness over its lack of numbers inthe Rajya Sabha, and instead cite the passage in theHouse of the Real Estate Bill this week as proof that it isgetting on with its legislative workload. Or it could heedthe spirit of the institutional mechanism of the amend-ment to a Motion of Thanks, and take up the subject high-lighted for a follow-up debate in Parliament.

Heeding the spirit of the amendment