Current Parliament session threatened with 'wash out', says Arun Jaitley

New Delhi: Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Monday apprehended a "wash out" of the current Winter session and invoked Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru to remind Congress of the responsibility of MPs for governance of the country through Parliament.

"The last session of the Parliament did not function. The current session of the Parliament is also threatened with a wash out. The reasons for the wash out of the current session keep changing by the hour.

"The nation is waiting for Parliament to discuss public issues, to legislate and approve a historic Constitution Amendment enabling the GST. All this is being indefinitely delayed. The question we need to ask ourselves is are we being fair to ourselves and this country?" Jaitley said in a Facebook post.

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The Finance Minister also quoted a speech on the Parliamentary system by Pandit Nehru to hammer home his point. He said that the speech delivered on March 28, 1957 in the last day of first Lok Sabha by Nehru is "a must read for all of us".

He quoted a paragraph from the speech in which Nehru had said, "Here, we have sat in this Parliament, the sovereign authority of India, responsible for the governance of India. Surely, there can be no higher responsibility or greater privilege than to be a member of this sovereign body which is responsible for the fate of the vast number of human beings who live in this country.

"All of us, if not always, at any rate from time to time, must have felt this high sense of responsibility and destiny to which we had been called. Whether we were worthy of it or not is another matter. We have functioned, therefore, during these five years not only on the edge of history but sometimes plunging into the processes of making history."

Taking a dig at Congress over frequent disruptions in Rajya Sabha, Jaitley said, "Those who claim the legacy of Pandit ji must ask themselves the question, what kind of history are they making."

Read: Fresh push on GST Bill, but government has ‘red lines’

With just eight days left for the winter session, Jaitley and Parliamentary Affairs Minster M Venkaiah Naidu on Monday held consultations with Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad and Deputy Leader Anand Sharma.

Government is keen to get the bill passed in this session to facilitate the roll out of the measure from April next year. With the Houses, particularly Rajya Sabha doing minimal business in Winter Session, the government has not been able to push through its legislative agenda including GST.

The meeting on Monday came as Government decided to make a fresh bid to break the logjam. External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and Chief whip of Congress Jyotiraditya Scindia also joined the consultations later.

At the hour-long luncheon meeting in Naidu's office in Parliament both sides stated their respective positions after which Naidu merely said "we will continue to meet".

The meeting over the GST happens in the backdrop of a campaign of Congress in Parliament over National Herald case.

While the main opposition party has rejected the charge that it was blocking the GST Bill because of the court summons to party president Sonia Gandhi and her deputy Rahul Gandhi in the National Herald case, while BJP continues to insist there is a link between the two developments.