The current session of Parliament has broken records for a somewhat dubious reason: it has seen the largest ever number of MPs suspended. An incredible 143 Opposition MPs have been targeted by the presiding officers of both Houses in response to the demand that the Union home minister make a statement about the security breach in the Lok Sabha on December 13.
Ironically, this has made little news. Instead, most national television news channels since Tuesday have been dominated by outraged discussions about the alleged insult to Vice President Jagdeep Dhankar. As the vice president presides over the Rajya Sabha, Dhankar effected many of the suspensions.
The purported indignation was sparked by an incident that occurred outside Parliament on Tuesday, when Kalyan Banerjee, a Trinamool Congress MP from West Bengal who was among those suspended, was seen satirising Dhankar’s actions.
“I have been appointed here only to save Narendra Modi,” Banerjee said mimicking Dhankar, even as Congress MP Rahul Gandhi recorded him on his phone. A group of suspended MPs laughed in the background.
The idea of someone satirising a politician by itself is rarely news in a democracy. That it has overshadowed the mass suspension of MPs is even more unusual. However, this tack is not new: during his time as governor of West Bengal from 2019 to 2022, Dhankar had also used the strategy of claiming to be hurt by insults wielded by his political opponents.
Governor vs government
As Scroll had reported at the time, Dhankar was an unusually belligerent governor. In fact, during his time in office, it was not the state unit of the Bharatiya Janata Party that acted as the principal opposition to Mamata Banerjee’s government – it was the governor. However, when attacked for this by the Trinamool, Dhankar often claimed he had been insulted since he occupied the chair of governor.
In October, 2019, for example, Dhankar told the media that he felt “insulted” since at a Durga puja function he was not seated on the main stage and was not shown on television. In November, he complained in the media that he had not been invited to the Kolkata Film Festival. In December that year, an angry Dhankar claimed that democracy had been “humiliated” and “insulted” since a specific gate of the state assembly that he wanted to enter through was locked (he later entered through another gate).
‘Apamanita’
In response to Dhankar’s attacks, the Trinamool was equally bellicose. Senior party functionaries and ministers attacked the governor head-on. At the time, Kalyan Banerjee – who is now at the centre of the mimicry controversy – ordered party workers to file cases against Dhankar, threatening to put him in “Presidency jail”. At one point, Chief Minister Banerjee even blocked the governor’s handle on Twitter.
The battle suited the Trinamool well. Dhankar’s decision to take up the Opposition space meant that the West Bengal unit of the BJP was relegated to the background. After all, the governor was not going to fight elections.
At one point, the Trinamool social media cell straight up took to mocking the West Bengal governor using the Bengali word “apamanita” or “insulted”.
While Dhankar’s strategy of arguing that he had been “insulted” by the West Bengal government did not gain much political traction (the BJP crashed to a major defeat in Assembly elections during his tenure), the governor-turned vice president is trying the same strategy to take attention away from the mass suspensions of MPs.
Unlike in Bengal, of course, the BJP has far more favourable conditions in Delhi, most prominently a largely friendly television media.
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