Trading chairs

Chances are Kapil Sibal has spent much of this weekend feeling uncomfortably akin to an errant schoolboy. The dynamic between the presiding officer and ordinary members in our legislatures has always evoked images of a classroom — an elder brimming with wisdom and patience, gently prodding her squabbling, garrulous charges to pipe down and prioritise their interventions. Of course, this could be rather unfair to our elected representatives, this insinuation that they require the mediation of the chair to be, well, parliamentary. But on Friday, once Najma Heptulla, deputy chairperson of the Rajya Sabha, had flounced out of the chamber, for just a few moments they confirmed these wicked thoughts. Once the chairperson had deserted the chair, there was that rarest of occurrences in the House of Elders: pin-drop silence. Without edicts from a higher authority, our honourable MPs were rendered immobile and wordless. It took one of her emissaries to rush out minutes later to confirm that the House had in fact been adjourned before they got the message: school’s out, scram.

But where does this leave their minder? This is, of course, not the first time that the presiding officer in Rajya Sabha has taken offence at an MP’s comments and up and left. M. Hidayatullah once walked out, back in 1980, outraged at an utterance by Sibal’s Congress colleague, Pranab Mukherjee. Then there was that heartwrenching sight some years later of Shankar Dayal Sharma, then vice president, bursting into tears, pleading helplessness in restoring order among fractious MPs.

But Heptulla must know that MPs will be MPs, they will argue, they will agitate to be the first to declaim on any issue — opposition MPs in particular. A veteran of so many years in Rajya Sabha, she must realise the wonderful perks that go with the assignment, most enticing among them a captive audience for her strictures and asides, do not include fits of temper. In any case, she is unlikely to echo the views of her counterpart in Lok Sabha, Manohar Joshi, when he sighed in his Speaker’s journal that it was mystifying why opposition MPs did not create more of a din on certain government policies.