Om Birla | Chair of the House

Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla’s re-election as the chair of the Lok Sabha after completing a full five-year term is being seen as part of the continuum that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is trying to establish between his last term and the current one.

After repeating nearly all Ministers in his Council of Ministers, and reappointing his earlier team of officials at the Prime Minister’s Office, the re-nomination of Mr. Birla as the National Democratic Alliance’s (NDA) candidate as Speaker was almost a given. Mr. Birla won, but not before some high drama with the Opposition fielding its own candidate and stopping just short of asking for a division of votes.

While this election of Mr. Birla had an air of inevitability around it, it wasn’t always the case. The choice of Mr. Birla for his first term as Speaker had taken everyone by surprise, including himself. Mr. Modi’s choice for Speaker in his first term as Prime Minister was the veteran Sumitra Mahajan, an eighth-term MP. In his second tenure, he picked Mr. Birla, a second-term MP from Kota, Rajasthan.

Mr. Birla, who began his career in student politics, in Kota, steadily climbed the party ladder while working at the youth wing of the BJP, the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM).

He went from the district unit head of the BJYM to its State president. He was elected to the Rajasthan legislature three times. His appointment as the Lok Sabha Speaker was a leap, both in profile and responsibility.

An RSS recruit, he was ideologically aligned to the Sangh Parivar, and had the trust of Mr. Modi, who had engaged with him on several occasions in the past with regard to politics in Rajasthan. Mr. Birla was evolving as an important resource from Rajasthan for the BJP’s national leadership, when this offer came his way.

First session

It was perhaps his experience as a backbencher in Parliament that helped him conduct the House smoothly in the early years. In the first session he presided over in 2019, all first time MPs got an opportunity to speak as he kept the Lok Sabha working till very late in the evening. A record 1,066 subjects were raised in the Zero Hour in the first session, another record.

When Pramila Bisoyi, a first term MP of the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) who had not even completed her primary education, kept avoiding all attempts to make her speak in Parliament, Mr. Birla sought her out to find out the reason only to discover that her hesitancy stemmed from her inability to speak either in Hindi or English. She spoke a local version of Odia. Mr. Birla then arranged an Odia to Hindi translator from among the Parliament staff, to help her speak.

When Ministers of the BJP-led government did not come up with satisfactory answers to questions by MPs on Question Hour, some got the sharp end of Mr. Birla’s tongue, with many Opposition MPs appreciating his efforts at ensuring everyone had their say in the House.

All this, however, was eclipsed when he created a new record by suspending 100 Opposition MPs in the Winter Session of 2023. And while everyone got a chance to speak, least number of government Bills went through parliamentary scrutiny. On the day he was re-elected as Speaker, Mr. Birla read out a statement condemning the Emergency— the Indira Gandhi-led Cabinet imposed Emergency 49 years ago — drawing protests from the Opposition.

The rough start raises questions on what approach Mr. Birla would take in his second term. Unlike in his first term, when the BJP had absolute majority in the House, this time, the BJP has formed a coalition government with NDA allies, and the Opposition seems resurgent.

Opposition MPs are hoping that Mr. Birla’s accommodative gestures from his previous tenure, in ensuring that all MPs get a chance to speak, and calling Ministers to account for not doing their parliamentary homework be the model he chooses to continue in his second tenure. But if he chooses to take the confrontational path, that could lead to showdowns. It is to be seen, which aspect of continuity he chooses to enforce.