Counterview: New Delhi: Sunday, May
07, 2017.
Information
obtained under the Right to Information (RTI) Act has revealed that Lok Sabha
speaker Sumitra Mahajan banked on what has been described as “truncated”
opinion of the Attorney General of India (AGI) while rejecting the claim of the
Indian National Congress (INC) for Leader of Opposition (LoP) in the lower house
in 2014.
Marked
“confidential”, the AGI, Mukul Rohatgi, in his “opinion” to the Lok Sabha
speaker on July 23, 2014, seeks to bank on the ruling of the first Lok Sabha
speaker, GV Mavlankar, in order to point out how, till 1969, which included the
“entire tenure of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, and thereafter”, there was no LoP.
Rohatgi
quotes Mavlankar’s "directions" to say that the LoP should have the
strength “equal to the quorum required in for constituting a sitting of the
House, which is one-tenth of the total number of the members in the Lok Sabha.”
Based on
this, says Rohatgi, in the sixteenth Lok Sabha, constituted in May 2014, the
largest opposition party, the INC, with just 44 members of Parliament MPs), did
not have the “quorum” – 10 per cent of the Lok Sabha strength, 55 MPs.
Rohatgi
argues, based on this "historical perspective", the speaker is “not
obliged to recognize any members of the largest opposition party in the Lok
Sabha as LoP in case the said party doesn’t the strength equal to one-tenth of
the quorum required for a sitting in the House.”
At the same
time, the RTI reply reveals, Rohatgi sets aside the Salary and Allowances of
Leaders of Opposition Act, 1977, which defines LoP.
The Act calls
LoP as “member of the Council of States (Rajya Sabha) or the House of the
People (Lok Sabha), as the case may be, who is, for the time being the Leader
of the House of the party in opposition to the government having the greatest
numerical strength, and recognized as such by the chairman of the Council of
States or the Speaker of the House of the People, as the case may be.”
Rejecting the
1977 Act’s definition, Rohatgi argues, “It is obvious from the definition of
LoP… that the recognition of a member as such is not governed by this Act, but
such a member has to be recognized by the speaker.”
He adds, “In
other words, the issue of recognition of a member of the House as LoP is
outside the purview of the Salary and Allowances of the Leader of Opposition in
Parliament Act, 1977.”
Based on
this, Rohatgi says, the “speaker need not recognize a member of the largest
opposition party in Lok Sabha as the LoP if the largest opposition party does
not have strength equal to the quorum required for a sitting of the House.”
Senior RTI
activist Venkatesh Nayak, who obtained the “confidential” information from the
Lok Sabha secretariat, says, what Rohatgi does not take into account is,
“Parliament rejected the idea of fixing a quota for claiming the LOP's chair
decisively” in 1977.
Says Nayak in
an email alert to Counterview, after the the Salaries and Allowances of LoPs
Bill was tabled in the Lok Sabha on August 6, 1977, "HV Kamath, an MP of
the Janata Party and belonging to one of its constituents -- the Jan Sangh -- a
previous avatar of the BJP moved amendment 15 to fix one-sixth as quota of
seats in the House required for any MPs to claim the LoP's chair.”
“In support
of his amendment proposal, Kamath quoted Mavalankar, where a reference was made
to the 10 per cent seat requirement. This amendment was decisively rejected by
Janata Party MPs who were in the majority in the then Lok Sabha”, Nayak says.
“So the
numerical strength argument was weighed, measured and discarded by the Lok
Sabha. To insist that 10% seat quota is essential to claim the LoP's chair
amounts to blatant disregard for the express intention of Parliament”, Nayak,
who is with the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, argues.
.JPG)
.JPG)
