NEW DELHI, Aug 8: The government today sought to hold Rajya Sabha Deputy Chairperson Najma Heptulla responsible for the fiasco on the Bill on the presidential and vice-presidential elections yesterday, saying that she had extended the House beyond 5 p.m. ignoring opposition from the treasury benches.Taking refuge on a technical point that the business advisory committee (BAC) of the House had not taken a decision to sit beyond 5 p.m., a senior Cabinet minister said that the deputy chairperson should have adjourned the House as there was no unanimity on whether proceedings should be extended or not.Sources in the Rajya Sabha Secretariat however said that the Chair had done the right thing in going by the majority view in the absence of unanimity. Bharatiya Janata Party members who insisted on extending the proceedings of the House were more in number than those belonging to the ruling coalition at that point of time.``After all, it was the government which had asked for the inclusion of the Bill on the agenda for five days including yesterday. This implied that the government ought to have been prepared for the discussion whenever it came up,'' the sources said.The Minister agreed that it was the government which decided what official business should be carried out each day. But, he said, the business was usually decided at the start of the week and hence it would be difficult to anticipate when a particular Bill would come up for discussion and voting.``In fact, we didn't expect that the Bill on private security guards would collapse, necessitating the taking up of the Bill on presidential elections 20 minutes before closing time yesterday,'' he said.It was the minister's argument that the deputy chairperson had erred in deciding that the so-called sense of the House could be taken on the basis of majority. ``The sense of the House is not decided by arithmetic,'' he said. He argued that it was not right to project the episode as an instance of poor floor management by the government.When pointed out that the House had sat beyond 5 p.m. on other days during the ongoing session despite there being no decision by the BAC, he said that on such days ther was genuine consensus to that effect.The Rajya Sabha Secretariat sources on the other hand sought to deny suggestions that the Chair had not been fair to the government. They said that the Deputy Chairperson had saved the day for the government yesterday when she ensured that the House agreed to defer voting on the Bill on private security guards by three days. Opposition members had pointed out several lacunae in the Bill.
