Often US Presidents also take to the wiser course of avoiding initiatives that are unpalatable to the other side to avoid embarrassment. Unlike here, their senators and Congressmen have the powers not only to stall regular bills but all major government decisions, including foreign treaties and agreements.

Under the Indian system, blocked bills are an anachronism. The PM and his Cabinet exist on the strength of their majority support in the Lok Sabha. And it is presumed that the PM has the legislative ability to get the official bills passed. Blocked bills never occurred under single party rule with a comfortable majority. It has been rare even under responsible coalitions. Failure to push through an official bill is taken as a loss of face for governments. Until July, 2008, the UPA had a convenient scapegoat in the obstructionist Left. Now that the PM has an increased majority, why this strange phenomenon of the government first valiantly coming out with so many legislations in quick succession and then putting them on hold?

At the beginning of the last session, the government had cited 19 pending bills. Of this, only four got passed last session. Apart from the 15 spill-over ones, half a dozen controversial bills are languishing at different levels of processing. They are of three categories - the very old ones like the labour, banking and insurance bills, women's reservation bill and the five-year-old communal violence bill; those mandated by commitment to foreign powers and corporate giants; and the ones to dilute Sonia Gandhi's flagship schemes by introducing restrictive eligibility criteria and thus make them ineffective. The most pressing and extremely difficult one is the Nuclear Liability Bill, now pending for four months.

Like the India-US nuclear deal itself, the liability bill is also in trouble. Under the accord, the last nitty-gritty of the deal should have been completed by February, 2010. There is no sign of it as yet. In November last, PM had assured that it would take just 'a few more days'. But Washington's changed priorities and new proliferation strictures have put the PM's biggest achievement in deep trouble. Paradoxically, this very embarrassment seems to have come to the rescue of the government on the nuclear liability bill. The bill seeks to exempt US firms Westinghouse and General Electric from paying a compensation of more than a trifling Rs. 300 crores to the accident victims in the event of a disaster at their plants in India. The government had given such a blanket assurance to the US giants in exchange for using their clout to lobby for the deal.

The liability bill has put the government in a big soup. It faces protests from human rights and public activists who cite the miseries of Chernobyl and our own Bhopal tragedy. Their argument that appeasement of foreign investors should not be at the cost of the sufferings of the victims seems to have secured wide public support. Eminent jurists like Soli Sorabjee (former attorney-general) have strongly come out against the government's 'criminal neglect' of people's safety. Apart from putting foreign firms' burden on Indian tax payers, the bill violates the 'polluter pays' principle set by the apex-court. Jurists warn that the bill, if passed, could be struck down by the Supreme Court as violative of the Constitution on several counts.

At least two other bills are facing public ire on the ground that they give undue advantage to foreign firms at the cost of people's health and welfare. The seeds bill remains blocked due its heavy tilt towards the interests of foreign seed giants. It even seeks to prevent farmers from selling their surplus seeds to others in villages. Farmers' groups allege that this is to give seed monopoly to foreign firms. The Biotechnology Regulatory Authority of India bill (BRAI), now hastily redrafted, is by far the most draconian. It has been put even beyond the purview of the RTI act, Sonia Gandhi's most popular initiative. The BRAI bill also seeks to punish (one year jail plus fine) those activists who venture to question the safety of the Bt. food by citing scientific data.

Those scientists conducting private research to verify seed giants' data on harmful effects on people's health, if any, face ten years in jail plus a huge fine. The RTI act itself is being diluted to give exemptions to bureaucracy and foreign corporate giants at the cost of people's right to know. More worrying, the seven sweeping amendments to the act have reportedly come from the PMO. Educationists and academics are protesting, some even going to streets, many provisions of Kapil Sibal's education bills. The didi has blocked the land acquisition bill approved by the Cabinet last year. Another set of bills face objections from the public activists and Congress men for their stealth moves to dilute the purpose of such lofty ideas as Food Security Bill thus jeopardising Sonia Gandhi's ideals.

The lengthening row of the doomed bills tells the grim tale of the pulls and pressures under which the UPA government functions. Responsible governments and their parliamentary managers always keep in mind their ability to get their bills passed in House. Failure to do so is seen as a loss of prestige. That is not so in UPA. This government just comes out with a bill when pressures from interest groups, invariably foreign, become unbearable. The lobbies often promise to mobilise the media backup and the numbers by winning over smaller groups. The other hope is to get the bills around when detractors are in bad shape.

What most of us have overlooked is the emerging phenomenon of parallel public opinion generated by enlightened groups of campaigners. The same middle classes who gained considerable clout during the reform era, has become the power house of this awakening. Public activists and those whom we dismiss as jholewallahs even outshine the mass media in reaching out to people. The intellectual support to Maoists, about which the Home Minister laments, has been a sub-text of this trend.

Consider this. Most of the fierce campaigns against the Manmohan Singh government's actions have come not from the opposition or Left but public activists and interest groups like farmers. These include protest against nuclear liability bill, Bt. brinjal, move to dilute RTI, and sugar ordinance. Technocrats can perhaps ignore this. But not Sonia Gandhi on whose shoulders lay the burden of seeking votes for the party. (IPA Service)