Parliament logjam: Budget session ends with lessons on how to duck no-trust vote

New Delhi: A no-confidence motion, the biggest parliamentary weapon in the Opposition’s armoury to vote out a government, became a casualty in the Indian Parliament that ended its budget session on Friday with hardly any substantial business undertaken in the second half due to daily ruckus.

Six opposition parties came together to give notices of the no-confidence day after day for 13 days, but Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan skirted them citing pandemonium as an excuse to adjourn the House every day. All legislative business ought to stop until the government regains legitimacy by defeating a no-confidence motion and the Speaker has to facilitate debate and voting on it, but nothing of that sort happened, allowing some 3 dozen AIADMK members to disrupt proceedings every day, including on Friday, during her 8-minute valedictory address.

The government has sufficient majority in the Lok Sabha to defeat the no-confidence motion, but the House set a new precedent that a minority government may exploit to avert defeat just by creating ruckus. The Speaker did not even refer to the no-confidence notices that were kept hanging in the valedictory address she chose to deliver at the start of the day’s sitting, instead of towards the end. And in her speech she glossed over all the acrimony that led to the washout – almost as if nothing had happened.

Speaker Mahajan went on to list passage of the Union Budget and related Finance Bill among the achievements, without stating that they were passed without even a minute’s discussion. Since she had nothing to highlight, the Speaker even included in her address such mundane matters as the inauguration of the Western Court annexe building by the PM. The Opposition blamed the government for prompting its ally AIADMK to disrupt the House to prevent the no-confidence motion and all other issues it wanted to discuss, while the ruling party blamed the Congress.

The BJP and its allies, in fact, held a half-hour demonstration before Mahatma Gandhi’s statue in Parliament House to put the entire blame on the Congress for derailing parliamentary democracy by stalling all business. As against this, Rajya Sabha Chairman M Venkaiah Naidu shed tears over “decline of parliamentary institutions” and referred to the prolonged stalemate in the House.

In his valedictory address, also delivered as soon as the House met by not allowing any listed business, Naidu wondered, ‘‘if fears of those who doubted the need of a second chamber during the debates in the Constituent Assembly were coming true.” “As a result, we are all losers. This includes the opposition, the ruling party, the government and, most importantly, the people and the nation,” he said, giving a wake-up call to the members to reflect.

Putting on record that the House lost 124 hours of business time during the budget session, as against only 45 hours of work, he said: “This is a sad commentary on the functioning of our parliamentary institutions, reinforcing the perception that they are on the decline.”