Samajwadi Party MP Akhilesh Yadav shakes hands with Congress' Rahul Gandhi during the first session of the 18th Lok Sabha, in New Delhi, Tuesday, June 25, 2024.
Credit: PTI Photo
New Delhi: After fighting the Speaker's election, the Opposition I.N.D.I.A. bloc is now turning its attention to put pressure on Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla to announce the schedule for election of Deputy Speaker, which remained vacant for five years in the previous Lok Sabha.
Sources said informal consultations have started among bigger I.N.D.I.A. parties to put pressure on the Speaker to set the date and on the government to allot the post to the Opposition.
As a first step, sources said, there are plans to submit a "joint letter" to the Speaker asking him to immediately initiate the process for election of Deputy Speaker, a Constitutional position.
According to Article 93 of the Constitution, "The House of the People shall, as soon as may be, choose two members of the House to be respectively Speaker and Deputy Speaker thereof and, so often as the office of Speaker or Deputy Speaker becomes vacant, the House shall choose another member to be Speaker or Deputy Speaker, as the case may be."
In the previous Lok Sabha, no Deputy Speaker was chosen though the Opposition raised it regularly.
An analysis of the choosing of Deputy Speaker showed that the biggest gap in choosing Deputy Speaker was in 12th Lok Sabha when PM Sayeed took over the post on the 270th day after the Speaker's election. In the 11th Lok Sabha, Suraj Bhan was elected as Deputy Speaker within 52 days.
Sayeed again became the Deputy Speaker in 13th Lok Sabha when it took just seven days after the Speaker’s election, similar to the number of days taken by Charanjit Singh Atwal and Karia Munda in the 14th and 15th Lok Sabha respectively. In 2014, M Thambi Durai was elected on the 71st day.
The I.N.D.I.A. bloc decided to field Kodikunnil Suresh as its Speaker candidate after the government refused to commit to give Deputy Speaker's post to the Opposition. The first Lok Sabha also saw election to the post of Speaker after the government refused to accede to the Opposition demand for Deputy Speaker's post.
"One should know that the Speaker cannot get away with what he did in the past five years. We will be putting pressure on him to schedule the election. It is unconstitutional not to have a Deputy Speaker," a senior I.N.D.I.A. bloc leader said.