Parties exchange banter on duration of House sessions

All-party meetings are generally staid affairs, with pleasantries being exchanged and agreements sought on various issues.

That, however, was not the way to describe an all-party meeting called by Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee yesterday. There were fireworks and heated exchanges between the government and the Opposition.

The subject of discord was the complaint made by VK Malhotra (BJP) that the government was making Parliament sessions to shrink and that the amount of legislative work being done had come down drastically.

At this, Leader of the House Pranab Mukherjee interjected saying it was, in fact, the Opposition that was not letting the House complete its business.

Sources said the BJP then threw the book at the minister, pointing out that the Congress, when it was in the Opposition, had in fact got the House adjourned 181 times.

There was a suggestion, from the Left, that House sessions be increased by 100 days. At this, Mukherjee said he had no problem, only that the Opposition should give an "undertaking" that it would not "disrupt" the House.

Things got out of hand after that, with Malhotra saying the Opposition had the democratic right to raise issues in Parliament. "The government should also give us some assurances on certain issues," he is reported to have said.

CPI leader Gurudas Dasgupta tried to intervene, but soon got into an argument with Mukherjee over the Left's "tendency" to "disrupt proceedings as well".

While this argument went on for some time, a decision taken by the business advisory committee accepted a suggestion, which restricted a member from speaking more than once a week in Parliament.

The move is supposed to curb the tendency by certain members to hog all the time allotted to their party and to give back-benchers a chance to make their mark.

The move has apparently miffed the most loquacious speakers in the House, including the Left's Dasgupta and Basudeb Achariya, the Samajwadi Party leader Ramji Lal Suman, the Rashtriya Janata Dal's (RJD) Devendra Prasad Yadav and the BJP's SK Modi.