Promise v/s Performance part 1: PDP MPs fail to deliver

With the parliamentary election round the corner, it is time to assess the performance of regional parties in the Parliament. We start the series with J&K PDP, which had won all the three parliamentary seats in the valley in 2014.

In its election manifesto for Lok Sabha elections, “Mandate for a Mission”, PDP had promised to “make the parliament a forum for representing the Kashmir issue at the national level.”

   

“Our mission in the parliament will be to drive, persuade and convince all the parties to formalise a basic Kashmir policy,” the manifesto read, and assured a common minimum program in this regard.

“PDP aspires to change the national mindset through its interventions in the parliament,” it said.

Five years down the road, what has been done? Far from any interventions, the three veterans of PDP elected by the people to the parliament have a very poor track record of attending and intervening in the House.

Muzaffar Hussain Baig, on whom J&K PDP pinned high hopes “to build parliament as a forum for dialogue on and development of J&K” has fared the worst. With 11 percent attendance, he rarely attended the parliament, and when he did, he remained a silent spectator hardly ever participating in debates or seeking information through questions. He participated in just three debates in his five-year-long stint in the parliament. He holds a unique dubious distinction of not asking a single starred question. An average parliamentarian raised 285 questions, while Baig asked 19.

Though Mehbooba Mufti and Tariq Karra resigned midway, their track record is not much better. With attendance of 35 per cent (for the period that they were members), which is less than half of the national average of attendance, they too hardly participated in any debates. Combining these three indicators of performance into an index, the average score of the three PDP MPs at 13.9 out of 100 is a historic record of poor performance.

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