[With Parliament effectively shutdown, several important pieces of legislation were left unattended and will not be addressed at earliest until Parliament reconvenes in the winter. In particular, lawmakers had been expected to pass legislation to reform India's woefully outdated policies on acquiring land for industrial, urban and other projects. Other issues expected to be addressed included reservations for government jobs, anti-money laundering measures and protecting whistle-blowers. ]
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Associated Press
Trinamool Congress party lawmakers staged a protest outside Parliament
to oppose the government’s fertilizer policy in New Delhi on Aug. 27, 2012.
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The Indian Parliament's "monsoon" session ended Friday after repeated disturbances, with little to show for its 19-day stretch in the way of bills passed or legislation debated.
The Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, the principal opposition to the Congress-led government, repeatedly interrupted the session's proceedings to protest the allocation of India's coal resources, leading to debate about whether disruption is a legitimate parliamentary tool. But on Friday, the opposition defended its actions.
"Disruption can sometimes produce results that discussion cannot," Arun Jaitley, a senior BJP leader, said at a news conference. The BJP had to resort to this extreme tactic, he said, because the Congress-led government "is a regime which is committed to kleptocracy."
Congress party leaders, for their part, called the BJP's tactics obstructionist and undemocratic.
"This is a negation of democracy," said Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in a televised address outside Parliament. "If this thought process is allowed to gather momentum, that will be a grave violation of the norms of parliamentary politics as we have understood it."
With Parliament effectively shutdown, several important pieces of legislation were left unattended and will not be addressed at earliest until Parliament reconvenes in the winter. In particular, lawmakers had been expected to pass legislation to reform India's woefully outdated policies on acquiring land for industrial, urban and other projects. Other issues expected to be addressed included reservations for government jobs, anti-money laundering measures and protecting whistle-blowers.
The Lok Sabha, or lower house, worked a total of 25 hours in this session of Parliament, or 20 percent of the scheduled time, according to numbers crunched by the New Delhi-based PRS Legislative Research. Much of that time was spent shouting and sloganeering, the research group said.
The Rajya Sabha, or upper house, was marginally more productive, clocking 27 hours, or 27 percent of the time the members had originally set out for work.
Now that Parliament's session has ended, opposition lawmakers said they would expand their protest in the coal case. They met in the courtyard of the main Parliament building, holding placards and shouting slogans, on Friday afternoon.
"Now our agitation for corruption-free India will go from Parliament to street," L. K. Advani, a senior leader of the BJP, told journalists.
Parliament spends $1.6 million a day to operate, Minister of Parliamentary Affairs Pawan Kumar Bansal said at a news conference at the end of the session. During the last session, ministers planned to introduce 32 bills and pass at least 15, he said. Instead, four were passed.
"This session will be known for work not done," said Mohammad Hamid Ansari, the chairman of the upper house. Of nearly 400 "starred questions," or those for which lawmakers expect an oral answer from the relevant minister, only 11 were answered. "Question Hour," when legislators discuss issues of the day, happened only once in the 19 days.
Commentators say Parliament has become a platform for politics, not lawmaking. "A counter-parliamentary culture has developed in this country," said Subhash Kashyap, who was a researcher in the country's first Lok Sabha and went on to be the house's secretary general. When the Congress party is in the opposition, he said, its members disrupt Parliament, and when they are in power, they "lecture others on discipline and good conduct." The BJP "does exactly the same," he added.
One of the primary reasons for this state of affairs, Mr. Kashyap said, is that the current government doesn't enjoy a substantial majority in Parliament. Making matters worse, he said, are the numerous scandals that have chipped away at its "moral authority."
A few decades ago, Mr. Kashyap recalled, disruptions were an aberration. "They have now become the rule," he said. He recalled an incident in 1989 when 63 members of Parliament were suspended for a week for not allowing Parliament to function smoothly.
"There has been an overall slowdown in the legislative process," said Devika Malik, an analyst at PRS Legislative Research. The fallout of all these disruptions, Ms. Malik pointed out, is that not only is Parliament passing fewer bills, but it is also spending less time discussing those bills.
The current Lok Sabha, which Ms. Malik said is on a path to becoming the least productive in the country's history, has passed an average of 40 bills a year since its members were elected in 2009. By comparison, the first Lok Sabha passed an average of 72 bills each year.
One in five bills passed since 2009 has been discussed for less than five minutes. The four bills passed in this "monsoon" session were voted on amid chaos and shouting.
[Many other senior officials, including several in the White House, expressed deep reservations that blacklisting the group could further damage badly frayed relations with Pakistan, undercut peace talks with the Taliban and possibly jeopardize the fate of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the only American soldier known to be held by the militants. ]
By Steven Lee Myers And Eric Schmitt
VLADIVOSTOK, Russia — In a report to Congress on Friday, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton formally designated the militant Haqqani network — responsible for some of the deadliest attacks against American troops in Afghanistan — as a terrorist organization, two days before a Congressional deadline.
Mrs. Clinton signed the order in Brunei before departing to Vladivostok for the annual Asia Pacific Economic Conference, and State Department officials began notifying senior lawmakers. She issued the report after a last round of internal debate that took place in Washington on Thursday hours before President Obama spoke at the Democratic National Convention.
Mrs. Clinton and others have already discussed the issue with their counterparts in Pakistan, and the administration’s special envoy, Marc Grossman, is expected to formally inform Pakistan’s leaders on Friday.
The decision is the culmination of nearly two years of spirited debate inside the administration that reached a peak in the past month under the pressure of Sunday’s reporting deadline.
Several State Department and military officials had argued that designating the organization would help strangle the group’s fund-raising activities in countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and pressure Pakistan to open a long-expected military offensive against the militants.
Many other senior officials, including several in the White House, expressed deep reservations that blacklisting the group could further damage badly frayed relations with Pakistan, undercut peace talks with the Taliban and possibly jeopardize the fate of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the only American soldier known to be held by the militants.
But in the past few days, supporters of designating the group apparently eased most concerns or put forward contingencies to mitigate the risks and potential consequences.
“This shows that we are using everything we can to put the squeeze on these guys,” said one administration official who was involved in the process, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity on Thursday because the decision had not yet been formally announced.
Another senior administration official said the designation “is a very strong signal of our resolve to combat the Haqqanis.”
Critics had contended that a designation by the Treasury Department or the United Nations could achieve largely the same result as adding the network to the much more prominent State Department list, with far fewer consequences.
But many senior counterterrorism officials as well as top American military officers, including Gen. John R. Allen, commander of American and NATO troops in Afghanistan, had said designating the organization should be a top priority.
“F.T.O. designation could reduce a critical capability of the Haqqani network by increasing the cost of doing business, reducing access to capital, and constraining the network’s financial resources, thereby limiting their freedom to operate in a local, regional, and international context,” Jeffrey Dressler, senior Afghanistan analyst for the Institute for the Study of War, a research organization here, said in a paper issued this week, referring to foreign terrorist organizations.
Mr. Dressler said the Haqqani network’s business interests stretched from Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the Persian Gulf, and included car dealerships, money exchanges and construction companies, import-export operations and smuggling networks.
Since 2008, Haqqani suicide attackers have struck the American Embassy and Indian Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, as well as the headquarters of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force and hotels and restaurants there.
American officials confirmed last week that a senior member of the Haqqani family leadership, Badruddin Haqqani, the network’s operational commander, was killed recently in a drone strike in Pakistan’s tribal areas.
Pressure in Congress to add the group to the terrorist list had grown this year. “The Haqqani network is engaged in a reign of terror,” Representative Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican who is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said in July. “Now is the time for action, not simply paperwork and talk.”
With virtually unanimous backing, Congress approved legislation that President Obama signed into law on Aug. 10 giving Mrs. Clinton 30 days to determine whether the Haqqani network was a terrorist group, and report her decision to lawmakers by Sunday, coincidentally three days after the end of the Democratic National Convention.
Critics of designating the group a terrorist organization say the action could drive a wedge between the United States and Pakistan, just as the countries are gingerly recovering from months of grueling negotiations to reopen NATO supply routes. Pakistan closed the routes through its territory after an allied airstrike near the Afghan border last November killed 24 Pakistani soldiers.
These same critics say such a move would appear to bring Pakistan a step closer to being designated as a state sponsor of terrorism. American officials say Pakistan’s main spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, is secretly aiding the insurgents. Pakistani officials have said the agency maintains regular contact with the Haqqanis, but deny that it provides operational support.
Two Pakistani officials said last week that the decision was “an internal American issue.” American analysts believe that Pakistan would be reluctant to publicly protest the designation, because to do so would substantiate American beliefs that Pakistan supports the Haqqanis.
Steven Lee Myers reported from Vladivostok, Russia, and Eric Schmitt from Washington.
