Is the food security bill, which will purportedly reach food to “67 percent” of Indians, as information and broadcasting minister Manish Tewari put it, more important than raising a din and trying to address, and end, the Congress party’s “hunger for ill-gotten money”, as the opposition BJP put it?

That is food for thought for sure.

What is, however, fodder to none is the objective and the timing of bringing in the bill. As an article in firstpost.com put it, the bill was “moved for passing just yesterday (Monday), when the Congress was caught in a political jam”.

Like Monday, when the bill was tabled, Tuesday, too, saw ruckus galore in parliament, leading to adjournments more than once, as the BJP and other opposition parties kept up their demand for resignations of railway, law and prime ministers Pawan Kumar Bansal, Ashwani Kumar and Manmohan Singh, respectively.

Soon as parliament convened on Tuesday morning, almost the entire opposition began a racket, with the BJP and AIADMK demanding resignation of the PM, Bansal and Kumar, and the Samajwadi Party (SP) joining in, seeking implementation of the Sachar committee recommendations for the welfare of religious minorities. The Left, too, demanded Ashwani Kumar’s resignation.

If the problem is one of timing — incidentally, the Union cabinet had cleared the decks for 51 percent FDI in multi-brand retail, among others, in the monsoon session, when the government was cornered over the coal blocks allocation scam — the issue just gets a tad more convoluted. Sushma Swaraj, the leader of opposition in Lok Sabha, has already criticised that timing. “The way the government tried to pass the food security bill today (May 6) is an attempt to divert attention from the corruption of their ministers,” Swaraj told reporters on Monday.

There is a contention that the government could have brought in the bill at any other time. That line of reasoning, though, does not factor in the bit that “corruption”, as Swaraj put it, is seemingly never far off the mind of UPA ministers. So the political jam, to put it in other words, would never be far off even in the few sessions remaining, as it appears at present.

So what’s the way out? Manish Tewari, the I&B minister, says the government would not promulgate an ordinance on the food bill if it is not passed in the budget session. "We want the bill to be passed after a discussion,” he was quoted by PTI. “While some parties have constructive views on it, the party which calls itself the major opposition party is politicising the issue.”

Senior BJP leader and Rajya Sabha member Ravi Shankar Prasad was quoted on NDTV.com: “There will be no compromise on corruption... disruptions are also a part of parliamentary tradition. If the UPA has been elected to govern, we have been elected to hold them accountable for the people."

The jam, one can be reasonably certain, is set to continue. More than the passage of the food security bill, that is a bigger food for thought: notwithstanding Tewari and Prasad’s harangue, can we have a decent debate and discussion on both the multifarious scams taking a jab at the UPA government and the stuck-for-this-session food security bill, and precisely in that order?