House keys with Speaker Om Birla

The decision of the BJP to repeat Om Birla, the Speaker of the 17th Lok Sabha, for the office is of a piece with its intent to project stability and continuity in government. He was elected on Wednesday by a voice vote, a rare event for the last time an election was held for the office of the Speaker was in 1976 when the nation was under the dark blanket of the Emergency. The election, a departure from the convention of nearly half a century, also marks a lost opportunity for the government to build bridges with the Opposition. All that the treasury benches needed to do was to assure the Opposition that it would concede to the latter’s choice for the office of the deputy speaker, a convention followed until 2014. Such a gesture would have helped the new House to begin on a clean slate and bury the bitterness that defined the relations between the government and the Opposition in the last term.

Speaker Birla could do well to recognise the sentiment in the speeches of the Opposition leaders who congratulated him on his appointment. Samajwadi Party leader Akhilesh Yadav may have spoken for all of the Opposition when he said, “We expect that the Opposition’s voice won’t be crushed in the House.” And the new Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi offered a hand of friendship: “Opposition would like to assist you in your work. I am confident you will allow us to speak in the House.” The 17th Lok Sabha witnessed many acrimonious scenes and the perception of the Speaker as a non-partisan arbitrator of parliamentary proceedings took a hit following a flurry of suspensions of members: The last winter session of Parliament saw 146 MPs, all from the emaciated Opposition, getting suspended, 78 of them in a single day. In this chaos, many important legislations were turned into law without necessary debate or scrutiny.

The new House has a completely different look: A 236-member strong Opposition will be a different challenge for a 293-member NDA. It will require skillful floor management by the treasury benches if the House is to deliver on its mandate. Speaker Birla’s inaugural address to the House was ominous as he invoked the Emergency to say that the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had imposed dictatorship on the country. The government can still retrieve lost ground – the onus on ensuring the smooth running of Parliament rests with the treasury benches – by inviting the Opposition to nominate the deputy speaker. A harmonious Parliament with bipartisan consensus is a welcome, and possible, idea.