Speak up, Speaker

Nobody can remain angry for ever. And when CPM General Secretary Prakash Karat and his comrades come to terms with the defiance of Somnath Chatterjee — at least initially — over orders to quit as Lok Sabha speaker, they are bound to be, for want of a better phrase, red-faced. Karat has softened the sharpness of his diktat by repeatedly saying that Chatterjee would take his own decision. That is, of course, a fact. Nothing, even with the stringent anti-defection regulations in place, puts the speaker within the purview of a party whip. Yet, so daunting would be the prospect of causing a bitter break with a political party one has been closely associated with for decades, that Chatterjee must be applauded for holding out as long as he has. At stake is a principle on which the spirit of our parliamentary democracy rests, and we worry for the implications that may flow from the current confrontation.

Only Karat can explain what drew his party into making its MP’s continuance as speaker a point of prestige, the need for every single vote against the government or just to snub the Congress-led UPA. But the spectacle has let loose an idea thus far unuttered in polite circles. In assorted state assemblies, speakers have brought immense disrepute upon their office in conducting confidence votes. They have, for instance, abused their powers to make decisions on defections to carry their parties through. Also, sharply divided state assemblies, like Himachal’s in the ’90s, have had trouble electing a speaker, with parties reluctant to lose a vote in the show of confidence thereafter. But it has not been a practice in these narrow contests for a sitting speaker to resign and alter the equation in any way. What the Left has suggested to the Lok Sabha speaker is this dangerous possibility.

Some of our state assemblies — like Goa’s and Jharkhand’s — are so chronically given to controversy and controversial proceedings that it has been hoped that Lok Sabha, through its speaker, would engage meaningfully with them to emphasise certain norms. It would be a pity if the CPM’s intransigence on Chatterjee’s valid concerns instead made the Lok Sabha a source of bad precedents.