In July last year, the first session of the 17th Lok Sabha saw 33 bills (excluding the Finance and Appropriation Bills) being cleared in the Lok Sabha. The opposition leaders backed the government business — bypassing the standing committee scrutiny in several cases — but wanted an assurance from the government floor managers that they would be allowed to debate at least one issue a week under Rule 193 (a debate that ends without voting). That wasn’t forthcoming, and not one such debate under Rule 193 happened.

In the Winter Session, the government agreed to just one debate under the rule, according to Trinamool Congrees Lok Sabha leader Sudip Bandopadhyay.

Many senior leaders in opposition parties say this, more than anything else, underlines the inability of the government when it comes to floor management.

The ongoing Budget Session of Parliament is stuck in a deadlock for the past four days over the Opposition’s demand to immediately discuss the Delhi riots. With the BJP in no mood to relent , legislative business has suffered.

Opposition leaders say that in the previous Lok Sabha, senior ministers of the BJP such as the late Arun Jaitley, the late Ananth Kumar or Venkaiah Naidu (now the country’s vice-president) managed the floor deftly.

In January 2016, when the fate of the GST bill and some other legislative business looked bleak, Naidu, then the parliamentary affairs minister, met Congress party chief Sonia Gandhi seeking her support to run the House — something which no other BJP leader had done before. Within the following few days, Jaitley and Naidu arranged a meeting between PM Narendra Modi and Gandhi and former PM Manmohan Singh to thrash out differences on the GST bill. The bill was finally passed in August 2016.

“Leaders like Jaitley maintained an excellent equation across party lines. Inter-personal equations play an important role… Also, he had the authority; if he promised something to Opposition leaders, they knew it would be done,” said a seniorOpposition leader who asked not to be named.

In 2014, Jaitley, the leader of the Upper House, took the final call on the Opposition’s demand for form a select panel on the Insurance Bill to review the clause on increasing FDI in the sector. While the Opposition was in a majority in the Rajya Sabha, he and Naidu also managed to negotiate their way to a panel that finally included members from both the ruling and the Opposition side said a senior RS official on condition of anonymity

In the UPA era, finance minister Pranab Mukherjee (who was also the leader of LS) handled negotiations with the Opposition. When Nitin Gadkari became the BJP president, Mukherjee quickly included him in his weekly meetings with LK Advani and Leader of Opposition in LS , the late Sushma Swaraj. It helped Mukherjee get a clearer picture of what the BJP wanted and also helped arrive at solutions on parliamentary issues.

The government doesn’t have anyone who can do this today, say analysts.

One of the best stories of parliamentary negotiations goes back to the Atal Bihari Vajpayee era. The BJP had stalled the patent bill brought by the earlier Congress government in 1995. But in 2002-03, India started facing trouble in the World Trade Organization and the NDA’s commerce minister Murosoli Maran moved the same patent bill with just two changes: the name of the minister presenting the bill and the date of introduction. The bill was later cleared.

“When Kamal Nath (the parliamentary affairs minister) used to hold luncheon meetings with members from opposition parties every week. But today the top leaders of the BJP do not negotiate…,” said a senior Congress leader requesting anonymity.