New Delhi, July 27: The 14th Lok Sabha has created a record of sorts to be in the news for all the wrong reasons.
Never in the history of Parliament has a Speaker been expelled by the party to which he belongs.
A defiant Somnath Chatterjee was shown the door last week by an angry CPI(M) for his failure to quit the high office before the recent session of Parliament which saw the trust vote against the Government.
Chatterjee is also perhaps the first Presiding Officer
who was boycotted by the opposition for an entire day.
The alleged "cash-for-votes" scam surfaced in the two-day
special session with three BJP MPs alleging that they were
each offered Rs three crore as bribe to abstain from voting
during the confidence motion.
Leader of the Opposition and senior BJP leader L K Advani
has suggested that the scam is more serious than the Bofors
kickbacks scandal that resulted in the Congress losing power
in the 1989 elections.
The opposition is charging government with having a
"tainted" victory in the trust vote, a charge dismissed by the
ruling side. The Speaker has observed that stringent
punishment will be meted out to the guilty.
In fact, expulsions, disqualifications and convictions
galore in the Lower House, which has recently entered the last
year of its five-year term.
An unprecedented 10 members were expelled two years ago
in the wake of the cash-for-query scam as the House took a
serious note of the misconduct of some of its own members
following a TV sting operation.
The Supreme Court also upheld the act of expulsions, which
followed the Speaker referring the issue to a committee to go
into the misconduct charges.
There was only one case of expulsion for a similar
misconduct in 1951 when the Provincial Parliament removed H G Mudgal for accepting money from Bombay Bullion traders for
doing their work in Parliament. His resignation was not
accepted.
In the current Lok Sabha, four MPs were reprimanded by
the House in the sting operation on the MPLAD scam, while in
another case, an RJD MP was meted out with similar punishment
when he took a woman friend on an official tour of a
Parliamentary committee by projecting her as his wife.
BJP MP Babubhai Katara was arrested in a human
trafficking case.
Besides, the 14th Lok Sabha had also seen, perhaps for
the first time, stalling of the House over what had come to be
known as "tainted" Ministers, an issue raised by the
opposition concerning several Ministers in the Manmohan Singh
Government, allegedly involved in corruption and criminal
cases.
An MP - JMM chief Shibu Soren - was convicted for life in
a murder case. Soren has since been acquitted of the charge.
Soren, who is now seeking a berth again in the Union
Ministry, faced a situation of being a union minister and then
being sent straight to jail.
Two of the MPs - Mohammed Shahabuddin and Rajesh Ranjan
alias Pappu Yadav - have been in jail for long time in
connection with criminal cases.
The present Lok Sabha also witnessed the nationality of
one of its members being questioned. Congress member from
Assam M K Subba's citizenship was questioned by BJP but the
Speaker ruled that it was not for the House to decide in the
matter.
Subba dismissed the charges claiming that he was a
citizen of India.
A committee to enquire into the misconduct of MPs has now
embarked on an exercise on what constitutes misconduct.
Bureau Report