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Opposition parliamentarians said that the Bharatiya Janata Party government did not appoint the deputy speaker as the post is conventionally held by a member of the opposition party.
New Delhi: The 17th Lok Sabha will be the first to conclude its tenure without a deputy speaker, in a development that has been called “undemocratic” by opposition parliamentarians and unprecedented by experts.
The 10-day interim budget session which started on January 31 is the last sitting of the 17th Lok Sabha before it is adjourned ahead of the Lok Sabha elections scheduled to be held in April-May 2024.
Former Lok Sabha secretary general P.D.T. Achary said to The Wire that “there has never been a situation barring the present instance, where there has been no deputy speaker for the entire tenure of the Lok Sabha”.
“It is quite unlikely that the deputy speaker will be chosen by the house now. And there is no point now either. Deputy speaker is chosen along with the speaker and the practice has been to elect the speaker first and within a week’s time the deputy speaker will also be elected.”
Achary said that when it is a constitutionally mandated provision, it has to be adhered to.
“When there is a mandatory provision in the Constitution, the House has to abide by it. It is the House which has to elect the speaker as well as the deputy speaker. The proposal comes from the government. The speaker is from the ruling party and the convention has been that the deputy speaker will be from the opposition. While there is no written rule, sometimes the deputy speaker’s post has even been given to friendly opposition parties so they could have done the same.”
What the Constitution says
Article 93 of the Constitution states that the Lok Sabha needs to choose two members as the speaker and deputy speaker “as soon as may be”.
“The House of the People shall, as soon as may be, choose two members of the House to be respectively Speaker and Deputy Speaker thereof and, so often as the office of Speaker or Deputy Speaker becomes vacant, the House shall choose another member to be Speaker or Deputy Speaker, as the case may be,” it states.
According to the Statistical Handbook, Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs, the deputy speaker has been elected within a few weeks at the most. The longest it has taken till date to elect a deputy speaker was during the 12th Lok Sabha when it took 270 days to elect P.M. Sayeed as the deputy speaker when G.M.C. Balayogi was the speaker.
According to The Indian Parliament, a book authored by former Lok Sabha secretary general T.K. Viswanathan, available on the Parliament Digital Library, the members of the Lok Sabha elect the deputy speaker from amongst themselves, who presides over the deliberations of the house during the absence of the speaker.
“The deputy Speaker is vested with the same powers as the Speaker when presiding over a sitting of the house. The deputy Speaker, on being the member of a Parliamentary Committee, is appointed as the Chairman of that Committee. He, unlike the Speaker, can speak in the house, take part in its deliberations and vote as a member on any question before the house, but he can do so only when the Speaker is presiding.”
Parliamentary rules also state that the speaker nominates ten members to the Panel of Chairmen. In the absence of the speaker and the deputy speaker, one of them presides over the sittings of the house.
The panel members of the 17th Lok Sabha included BJP’s Rama Devi, Kirit P. Solanki, and Rajendra Agrawal; Congress’s Kodikunnil Suresh; A. Raja of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam; P.V. Midhun Reddy of the YSRCP; Bhartruhari Mahtab of the Biju Janata Dal; N.K. Premachandran of the Revolutionary Socialist Party; and Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar of the Trinamool Congress.
‘Undemocratic’
While it is not mandated by the Constitution, a parliamentary convention has developed over the years to choose a member of the opposition as the deputy speaker of the Lok Sabha.
The convention was first started by Jawaharlal Nehru who picked Sardar Hukum Singh of the Shiromani Akali Dal to be the deputy speaker in 1956. Subsequently, deputy speakers were from the ruling Congress until G.G. Swell, an independent member, was appointed during the Emergency years. Thereafter, members from the opposition have occupied the post, a convention that continued till the 16th Lok Sabha when the AIADMK’s M. Thambidurai was the deputy speaker.
According to opposition members, the BJP government has failed to appoint a deputy speaker because of this very convention of appointing a member from the opposition.
Congress’s chief whip in the Lok Sabha Kodikunnil Suresh said to The Wire that while the 16th Lok Sabha had a deputy speaker in the form of Thambidurai, he belonged to the AIADMK – an ally of the ruling BJP.
“In the 16th Lok Sabha Thambidurai was made the deputy speaker even though the AIADMK was an NDA partner. In the 17th Lok Sabha, the Congress had 54 members as the single largest opposition party. While the strength of the single largest opposition party has to be 56 to have a member as the deputy speaker, the Congress was two members short. But that is completely technical. If the government wants to give the deputy speaker post to the opposition party it can.