The suspension of 25 Congress Lok Sabha MPs — for five days — by Speaker Sumitra Mahajan marks a new low in Parliament. If we overlook the party political aspects of the matter, what stands out is that the main Opposition party has been as good as ousted from Parliament for the remainder of the Monsoon Session through the short-sighted use of the Speaker’s powers.
It can’t be a surprise that other Congress MPs have refused to attend Parliament. As it turns out, several Opposition parties joined the senior Congress leaders’ protest in the precincts of Parliament House. Some other parties showed their disapproval of the Speaker’s action by not attending the House.
The removal of the Opposition from the scene was known to be a routine affair in the Gujarat Assembly when Narendra Modi was the state chief minister. Observers have naturally now begun to speak of the “Gujarat model” to discomfit the BJP and the Prime Minister. The state has a unicameral legislature, and when the principal Opposition party was suspended en bloc, any measure could be hustled through without discussion, meaningful or otherwise.
This cannot happen in Parliament, of course, because there is an Upper House through which legislative measures must pass even when the government has an unambiguous majority in the Lok Sabha, and the BJP’s position is weak in the Rajya Sabha.
Nevertheless, an unintended consequence of the Speaker’s decision to suspend the Congress MPs in such large numbers is that both Houses of Parliament are experiencing a near shutdown, and legislative work has come to a standstill, reminiscent of the period in the wake of the coal allocations and the 2G irregularities under the previous dispensation.
It is true that in the last Parliament also, then Speaker Meira Kumar had suspended 17 MPs who used to raise the issue of Telangana to disrupt proceedings. Unlike now, however, several of these were from the Congress, or ruling party MPs at the time.
Whether Speaker Sumitra Mahajan has evicted the Congress MPs of her own volition is now a point of discussion. At least one senior Congress MP — M. Ramachandran — has been suspended who is known to be a model of parliamentary rectitude, and was at no point among the Congress MPs who used to march into the Well of the House with the demand that the external affairs minister resign. This does not speak of due diligence on the part of the Lok Sabha secretariat or application of mind on the part of the Speaker.
Disruption, we should be clear, has been caused in this instance because of the government’s disdainful disregard of the Opposition demand to probe the suspicious actions of the external affairs minister and the CMs of Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh.
