With spotlight on notice against Om Birla, past occasions also got back into focus; including when Nehru in the 1950s, Rajiv in ’80s defended the then Speakers. The debate and a vote on the no-confidence motion moved by Congress MP Rahul Gandhi-led opposition against Lok Sabha speaker Om Birla will be taken up on March 9, when the House reassembles after a recess in the budget session, parliamentary affairs minister Kiren Rijiju said on Sunday.
With the spotlight on the notice, three past occasions when such situations arose also got back into focus — including the first one, in which Rahul’s great-grandfather Jawaharlal Nehru defended the speaker who was accused of bias. That was nearly 72 years ago, in 1954, just seven years after India got freedom from British colonial rule. The motion was moved on December 18, 1954, in what was just the fourth year of India’s first elected Parliament. The target was the then LS speaker GV Mavalankar.
Then-PM Jawaharlal Nehru told Congress MPs during the debate that they were not to be bound by any ‘whip’ or party-line direction. He asked them to vote “regardless of party affiliations”. Nehru, India’s first PM, also urged the chair to give more time to the opposition in the debate. It was fiery. The opposition, weak in numbers, tore into Nehru directly, and accused the speaker of being partisan.
Intervening, Nehru said, “I would like to address the House, if I may, in my capacity and the high privilege of being the Leader of this House and not as a leader of the majority party.” He added, “So far as this majority party is concerned, I would like to tell them… vote as they like. It is not a party matter. It is a matter for this House, for each individual, to consider, regardless of party affiliations.”
What is said about the speaker, what is done about the speaker comes back on each one of us who claim to be members of this House, he said. “It is one thing not to like a ruling or to disagree with it or even to feel — if I may say so — slightly irritated about something that has happened. These things happen. But, it is completely a different thing to challenge the bona fides of the very person in whose keeping is the honour of this House,” Nehru said of the speaker. “I do not say that it is not possible at all to raise a motion against the Speaker. Of course, the Constitution has provided it… The point is not the legal right but the propriety; the desirability of doing it,” he said.
Responding to examples of “bias” given by the Opposition, Nehru said, “Mr (SS) More [MP of the Peasants and Workers Party of India, from Sholapur LS segment] in his soft and gentle voice, which often contains many bitter things, went on and told us of what happened to the head of a king in England in the 17th century. He told us of the practice of the British House of Commons 200 years ago and all that. I listened with amazement. Here was a serious matter, here we are in the middle of the 20th century, in the Republic of India, and we are told about what happened in the Middle Ages or some other time in England.”
Nehru argued that while “it is true that we follow to a considerable extent the practices of the British Parliament”, but he mentioned that “even the practices of the British Parliament are not governed today by what happened in the 17th century there”. “I listened to a number of speeches delivered from the opposite side. It was an exhibition of incompetence, frivolity and lack of substance,” he said.
The Congress had a brute majority, and the resolution was negated by a voice vote. Amid the present-day move by the Congress and the opposition, Narendra Modi’s BJP-led NDA regime has taken much the same argument, saying that Rahul Gandhi and his party have “insulted” Parliament and the country.
Back in 1966, a resolution against LS Speaker Sardar Hukam Singh failed to move forward after it could not secure the mandatory support of 50 members required for initiation. On April 15, 1987, the Opposition moved a resolution for the removal of then Speaker Balram Jakhar, the Congress stalwart whose son Sunil Jakhar is now the Punjab BJP chief after decades with the Grand Old Party.
Intervening in that 1987 debate, then-PM Rajiv Gandhi, Rahul’s father, quoted Nehru’s remarks twice from the 1954 debate. He slammed the Opposition for questioning the bona fides of the speaker. The resolution was defeated by a voice vote. In December 2024, the Congress-led Opposition submitted a notice in the Rajya Sabha seeking the removal of then Vice President and RS chairman Jagdeep Dhankhar, alleging partisan conduct. However, it was rejected at the preliminary stage on procedural grounds.
In the latest instance, a notice to bring the resolution for the removal of Om Birla was submitted by Opposition members last Tuesday. The row stems from Rahul Gandhi’s insistence that he be allowed to quote from an unpublished book of former India Army chief Gen MM Naravane.
Rahul said Gen Naravane’s words “show that PM Modi abdicated his responsibility” to make decisions during the border clashes with China in 2020. The government has rubbished it, saying the book cannot be quoted; it has not been approved by the defence ministry as the points in it are “not correct”. The friction increased when Rahul Gandhi said PM Modi had “sold India” in the trade deal recently agreed upon with Donald Trump-led US.
