When ‘liars and loudmouths’ hold Lok Sabha to ransom

The Lok Sabha was adjourned again on Friday without taking up the several No'-Confidence motions pending for several weeks. The failure drove the last nail in the coffin of a Budget Session reduced to a charade by the Government.

While the Government is clearly pleased at outwitting the Opposition, this session reflected poorly on the Speaker, whose position, authority and independence were sacrificed by the Government for scoring political points.

• Never before have so many notices for a no-confidence motion been blocked for so long a time
• Never has the Lok Speaker invited such ridicule for admitting to her failure to count up to 50 for three long weeks
• Never has the Lok Sabha been adjourned before within minutes for as long
• Never has the Lok Sabha been held to ransom by political parties in alliance with or close to the Government
• And never before has a Parliamentary Affairs Minister failed to take note of parties creating the disturbance and name those who are actually at their seat.

By not expelling the handful of MPs causing the disruption, Speaker Sumitra Mahajan embarrassed the institution. The rules empowered her to expel the members, get them physically removed or suspend them for the rest of the session. For three weeks, she did nothing of the kind under pressure from the Government.

The Speaker also failed to uphold the Constitution. No-confidence motions in the Lok Sabha takes precedence over all other business. The Constitution gives the Speaker no option but to drop all other business and allot time for discussion on the no-confidence motion. But instead, the Speaker allowed every other business of the Government to go through the motions while declaring her inability to count the number of MPs standing in support of the Motion.

This budget session, which passed the Union Budget without any discussion on any Grant—again a dubious first—will no doubt go down as a black chapter in Parliamentary history. It successfully reduced the Parliament to irrelevance.

For the record, since Independence 26 no-confidence motions have been moved in the Lok Sabha and 25 of them were unsuccessful. On one occasion the then Prime Minister resigned, making the motion redundant.

While coalition governments may have some justification in doing everything to hold up a no-confidence motion, the BJP and the NDA, which have a comfortable majority in the Lok Sabha, could have only one reason to stall the debate, and that is politics.

The Government did not want a discussion that could throw up uncomfortable questions ahead of the crucial Karnataka election. But by muzzling the voice of the Opposition in the House, it has done great disservice to Parliamentary democracy.

There was absolutely no effort by either the parliamentary affairs minister or the Leader of the House, or for that matter even the presiding officers, to resolve the impasse in the Lok Sabha, echoed several MPs , who also pointed out on Friday that consultative bodies such as National Development Council, National Integration Council or the Centre State Council have not had a single meeting since the BJP came to power.