Whether Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s kitchen contains onions (Egyptian or our own Bellary variety) or not, is something we would never really know. But we can safely say that the Minister didn’t ‘know her onions’ of Parliamentary debate while responding to questions on the rising prices of onions! And, in the process, found herself right in the midst of a huge social media storm, much to her discomfiture.
She had before her hundreds of examples of answers to Parliamentary questions that her civil servants had helped draft on various issues relating to her ministry. If she had carefully analysed them she would have noticed an important feature of these answers. Which is: Never reveal to members asking questions, an iota of extra information than what can be got away by way of an answer, without risking a motion of ‘breach of privilege’ from a member dissatisfied with the answer.
Most of the time, the answers are short and strictly to the point and nothing is furnished by way of further elucidation. The bureaucrats are not in the business of enlightening Members of Parliament. They are only in the business of drafting answers to questions. If these answers are short on enlightenment well, that can’t be helped. It is just the way things are. You can’t go wrong with that approach.
Now how would this piece of civil service wisdom apply in the present context? If the question from a Member was whether the minister had tasted Egyptian onions, instead of conceding that she hadn’t and the reasons therefor, she could have easily responded by saying, “Mr Speaker Sir, I do not know why the Member is interested in burrowing into the contents of my kitchen cabinet or curious about what I had eaten for breakfast this morning”. The point to be noted is this. There was a response. So has the Finance Minister tasted Egyptian onions? No, we wouldn’t know, nor indeed, ever likely to. In that sense, it was an answer and yet revealed nothing of substance. At the same time, it was a good enough answer in the context of the debate. What is more, it might well have triggered peals of laughter from the Treasury Benches if not across the House.
Some members from the Treasury benches could have raised objections on the ground that the member’s question is an intrusion into the privacy of a woman member and warranted a notice of breach of privilege. The resulting din would have derailed the discussion and used up precious minutes out of the time allotted by the Speaker to debate the issue of onion price rise. The government’s purpose would have been achieved.
An equally effective tactic by way of response is one where you don’t attempt to answer the subject of the question but answer the person. For instance, she could have said, ‘Mr Speaker Sir, in fairness the Member must first reveal if he/she had tasted Egyptian onions before asking me to reveal my eating preferences”. This would have certainly flummoxed the member posing the question in the first place who, it can be safely assumed, hadn’t eaten Egyptian onions or unlikely to distinguish an Egyptian one from a Lasalgaon variety. This too would have resulted in giving nothing away on the part of the government while at the same time potentially resulting in a derailment of the discussion. For, the members could have as easily got into a heated discussion about the colour of the Egyptian onions and how it differs from the Turkish ones or whether Indian onion has the right amount of pungency unmatched by anything available in any other part of the world, and so on.
Walked into the trap
By responding in the manner in which she did, she had unwittingly laid it on record that she hails from a family which has an extremely austere outlook on what goes into and what doesn’t in the stuff cooked at home. It was totally unnecessary as the Members of Parliament might very well have been aware of her family background and, for that matter, her own accomplishments as a distinguished member of the alumni of the Jawaharlal Nehru University.
The MP’s question was never driven by a curiosity over the minister’s dietary habits. It was meant to blunt the government’s response detailing the steps that it had taken to arrest and roll back the runaway rise in prices of onion. The government was claiming that it had contracted to import onion from various countries. If the opposition parties contended that the quantities involved are too meagre to make any meaningful dent in the price, it would still be countered by a counter claim that the marginal increase in supply would dampen actions of speculators and this might eventually cause a decline in the price to a level that is more in tune with a fair price for onion.
No one has the empirical data to prove or disprove these claims and counter-claims. So the opposition MP was artfully trying to take the debate away from hard-nosed demand-supply forces argument to a novel claim that overseas onions are not the same as Indian onions. Ergo, the government has not done anything to bring down the price. It is this trap that the FM walked right into and paid the price of being branded as elitist.
Parliamentary debates are not always about a group of wise men representing the cream of the society sitting down to find answers to vexing problems of the nation. Well, cynics amongst us might well claim that they never are. But leaving that aside, we would do well to remember that Parliamentary debates are not dissimilar to a high school debating contest. The only difference is instead of a book by Charles Dickens as the prize for emerging successful in the high school debate the prize in politics is one of winning the battle of perception among the voting public.
TN debate recalled
This writer recalls a debate in the Tamil Nadu Legislative Assembly many decades ago. The issue then was rising prices of ‘hank yarn’ (a special kind of winding of a long length of mill-made yarn) and how it is becoming unaffordable for handloom weavers. The minister responded by saying that the prices were fixed based on the recommendations of the ‘chithra’ committee. Suddenly in the course of the debate, one member got up and wanted to know as to who or what this ‘chithra’ committee that the minister was talking about. The latter had no clue.
Before the Secretary sitting in a special wing of the viewers’ gallery could come to the rescue, the members began speculating on the identity of this committee. One said, it could be an expert committee headed by a well-known dancer by that name. Another thought it was a committee headed by a stock broker who ran a broking business under the name ‘Chitra &Co’. Finally, the penny dropped with the answer coming up as South India Textile Research Association (SITRA, for short).
You see, the Tamil language, while far better endowed than the English language with an alphabet to coin words, nevertheless doesn’t have letters to distinguish the different sounds of the root sound ‘Sa’. So ‘SITRA’ became ‘Chithra’, phonetically speaking, that is.
The writer is a former Editor of
Business Line