Suspensions, slander, silent protest: As Om Birla returns, a look back

THE 18TH Lok Sabha got off on a contentious note on Wednesday after Om Birla, newly re-elected as Speaker, referred to the Emergency in his first address to the Lok Sabha, underlining the Congress’s role in it and seeking a resolution against the “blot on our history”.

This was shortly after Opposition leaders, while offering their congratulations to Birla on his re-election, expressed their hope that the new Parliament will be less stormy than the last one, with a record hundred MPs suspended under him as Speaker.

On Thursday, the Congress wrote to Birla, saying that his reference to the Emergency in his acceptance speech on Wednesday was “deeply shocking”. “Making of such a political reference from the Chair is unprecedented in the annals of the history of Parliament,” Congress general secretary K C Venugopal wrote. He told reporters that Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi had also raised the issue during his courtesy visit to Birla on Thursday.

With this, the spotlight was back on Birla’s chequered record as Speaker of the 17th Lok Sabha, even as he returns to the Chair in a new-look Parliament. Here are the highs and lows of Birla’s previous tenure as Speaker:

In December last year, over the course of the Winter Session of the 17th Lok Sabha, as many as 100 Opposition MPs were suspended. The suspensions were provoked by the Opposition’s protests demanding a statement from Union Home Minister Amit Shah over the security breach in Parliament that month, with four people managing to jump into the Well and release coloured gas from canisters.

Correspondingly, 46 Opposition members were suspended from the Rajya Sabha — making it the biggest number of simultaneous suspensions in a Parliament Session.

The Congress, as the