The 46th Harry Brittain Fellowship
17 May to 24 June 2004
SREYASHI DASTIDAR (India)
Thoughts in a Purple Haze
The visit to the House of Commons could easily have been a dry affair It didn't, thanks to Ron Davies of Worthing, West Sussex.
When we were ushered into the glassed-up press gallery of the House, we weren't even sure if Tony Blair would be attending the Question Hour, in which case his deputy, John Prescott, would field questions from the opposition. Most of us were prepared to make our mental comparisons with our countries, praise the crisp English of the MPs and get on with the rest of the day.
First Surprise. Blair was there to attend the Question Hour. And as he locked horns with Michael Howard, the leader of the Opposition, each calling the other "right honourable gentleman" when they must have wanted to say the opposite, I remembered a recent incident from the Indian Parliament. An opposition MP had called the Union Minister of Defence "a humungous fraud" after some damaging revelations about the defence ministry.
Outside No. 10 |
The treasury benches went up in arms against the opposition leader --- not because he had called the minister a "fraud", but because most of them were unfamiliar with the word humungous and thought it was an abuse.
In the House of Commons that day, as surely on most other days, every word of polite address could be read as something quite different, the hostility was so palpable.
But as history now has it, before things could get really hot, a purple haze descended on the chamber, the handiwork of "our good friend" (to use a British Parliamentary term) Ron Davies. It was hardly shocking for me, because in India, parliamentarians throw furniture at one another when they are in the mood. What is a little purple powder compared to that?
As we were herded out, we heard that what looked like harmless "gulal" (the coloured powder which Indians smear on each other during Holi, the festival of colours) could actually be anthrax. A whole new vision of security threats dawned on us, along with the realization that it could easily have been one of us. All the metal detection, frisking and screening in the world cannot hound out a tiny condom and some purple powder, and Davies and his accomplice passed through the same security check as we did!
Before we filed out of a red-alerted Westminster, and while one of us relived her experience for a TV crew, we heard that Blair had told Howard on their way out of the chamber, "I promise I didn't organize that, Michael", and that Howard had replied, "For once, I believe you."
This was British Parliamentary banter at its best.
For further information on the training programme,
contact
Jane Rangeley -
jane@cpu.org.uk
Tel: +44 20 7583 7733 Fax: +44 20 7583 6868.
