Procedural Farce

The latest gambit by the Congress-led Opposition, threatening to move a resolution to remove Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla, has little to do with safeguarding parliamentary propriety and much to do with disguising disorder as principle.

The trigger was unremarkable by recent standards. Amid sloganeering and protests, the Lok Sabha was adjourned minutes before Prime Minister Narendra Modi was to deliver his reply to the Motion of Thanks on the President’s address. Birla later said he had advised the PM to stay away, citing “concrete information” that opposition MPs might do something “unexpected” near the latter’s seat. The Opposition led by the Congress chose to escalate the matter by deploying the heaviest artillery in the parliamentary handbook, which is Article 94(c) seeking the Speaker’s removal.

They have accused the Speaker of defaming Opposition MPs, denying Congress leader Rahul Gandhi his right to speak, allegedly shielding a BJP member from censure, suspending eight opposition MPs, and maligning Congress women members.

This is only the fourth time such a resolution has been attempted against a sitting Speaker and none has succeeded thus far. Previous efforts failed not because Speakers were saints, but because Parliament recognised a distinction between institutional disagreement and institutional sabotage. That distinction now seems lost.

The Congress’s most emotive plank is gendered indignation. Its women MPs, including Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, have accused the Speaker of making baseless allegations under pressure from the ruling BJP to justify the PM’s absence. Meanwhile, eyewitness accounts submitted by BJP women MPs allege that opposition members stormed the well of the House, climbed onto the Speaker’s table, tore papers hurled them at the Chair and surrounded the PM’s seat.

Whatever the truth, the fact that is beyond dispute is that scenes of MPs clambering onto furniture and brandishing placards are not compatible with the lofty constitutionalism the Congress claims to embody.

Nor is the selective outrage convincing. The same Opposition that decries the denial of speaking time has perfected the art of ensuring that no one else can speak either. Walkouts, din and forced adjournments have now almost become de rigueur strategy on the Opposition’s part rather than constructive debate. The Motion of Thanks, that was meant to scrutinise the government’s agenda, was reduced to theatre.

The attempt to unseat the Speaker looks less like a defence of parliamentary dignity than an effort to launder misconduct through procedure. It weaponizes constitutional mechanisms while hollowing out the constitutional spirit that gives them meaning.

India’s Parliament is already diminished by declining debate and rising decibel levels. The Congress, once proud of its institutional inheritance, now treats institutions as stage props in a permanent agitation. A party that cannot control its own members’ conduct has little standing to sermonise about decorum. By turning farce into grievance and its grievance into grandstanding, the Opposition is acting as if it no longer knows the difference between protest and vandalism.