THE SINGER NOT THE SONG

The Vice President, who is also the Chairperson of the Rajya Sabha, threw a dinner for all those MPS whose term ended this session. Amongst the guests was Congress leader and constitutional expert, Dr Abhishek Manu Singhvi, a third term senior MP, who has been in the House for 16 years and seen many Prime Ministers and Rajya Sabha chairpersons. There was a great deal of bonhomie during the dinner on the lawns of the Vice President’s house, cutting across party lines, of the kind that is perhaps missing on the floor of the House in recent times. As Dr Singhvi pointed out once, that within the House there must be a certain access to speaking; as the saying goes, the Opposition must have its say, and the government will have its way, but that should not detract from the fact that we are bound together.

In fact, Dr Singhvi, whose wife is an accomplished singer, even sang one of his favourite songs, Kasme Vaade at the dinner, though he admitted that his was more in the league of bathroom singers. But he joked with Jagdeep Dhankhar that this is the one time the Vice President would not ask him to sit down so he was going to take advantage of the captive audience as this time the VP could not stop his speech. Speaking to Newsx when asked to compare arguing in court to speaking in Parliament, he commented that “in court the idiom is cold, logical, precise, page number, volume number… I have done this a hundred of times, get into my car at 12.30-1, change my (court) jacket and enter Parliament as the

lead speaker for the Opposition after (Arun) Jaitley has opened or Venkaiah Naidu or Yashwant Sinha have opened. The style with which I will speak in Parliament will be totally different. The canvas is larger, the flourish is different, the rhetoric is different, even if you assume the topic is the same one that I argued in court. And then, sometimes, at 3.304.00 pm on the same day I have met the press. Here, let’s assume it’s still the same topic, the approach is to get the Nobel Prize for miniaturization. Try to encapsulate it (the argument) in two concise sentences that your people love—gagar mein sagar. So that’s the third style of speaking on the same topic.” He added that at least twice in his life, after speaking on the same topic on the above three platforms he has then driven to a rally in Meerut

(on the same issue) at 5 pm and as he says, “that is the fourth style, the fourth idiom. There the canvas is even larger, logic takes a backseat to emotion and rhetoric. So you can imagine, it’s been a great learning curve for me.” Though knowing Dr Abhishek Manu Singhvi and the deft way with which he articulates

the party’s response on the floor of the House, another Rajya Sabha term may well be on the cards. Though that doesn’t give him much time to shore up his singing skills but about that he says, “I did the clever lawyer’s thing of marrying a singer!”