In December 1954, passion was running high in the Lok Sabha. The House was debating the first-ever resolution to remove a Speaker, G V Mavalankar, from office.
Dr N B Khare, a member representing Gwalior, whose voters had elected him on a Hindu Mahasabha ticket, was one of the resolution’s signatories. Highlighting his grievances against the Speaker, the impassioned Khare, a 72-year-old who was a doctor and had a long legislative career, accused Mavalankar of “mental murder, albeit effected non-violently”. He then raised some papers to show the House his rejected questions and stated, “Here are about two dozen death warrants of my poor dry dead questions. Not one was admitted in this Session.”
Parliament will witness a similar debate on March 9, when MPs are likely to discuss and vote on the motion to remove Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla. Opposition MPs have given a notice for the removal of the Speaker “because of the blatantly partisan manner in which he has been conducting the business of the Lok Sabha…”
The office of the Speaker can be traced to the Montagu–Chelmsford Reforms and the Government of India Act of 1919. These provided that the central legislative assembly would be presided over by a president, the first appointed and subsequent ones elected by the assembly members. The law provided that the elected presidents could be removed by the members through a vote.
In 1925, assembly members elected Vithalbhai Patel as their president. After his election, Patel declared, “From this moment, I cease to be a party man. I belong to no party. I belong to all parties.”
Ibrahim Rahimtoola and Shanmukham Chetty occupied the office from 1930 to 1935. Then came Abdur Rahim, a noted lawyer, who served for a decade until 1945. He was the first assembly president against whom a member moved a motion for removal, which was rejected on technical grounds.
And then in 1946, Mavalankar stood for election to the post. Before coming to the national legislature, Mavalankar had been president of the Ahmedabad municipality and then presided over the Bombay Legislative Assembly.
Mavalankar’s 1946 election was close. Everyone expected the government’s nominee to win by a few votes. Dr Khare recalls in his memoir that he helped sway two members to vote in favour of Mavalankar. In the end, Mavalankar won by three votes.
Mavalankar’s 1946 election marked the start of his stint as presiding officer at the national level. He became the bridge between the pre- and post-Independence legislature, and his colleagues in the first Lok Sabha elected him as their Speaker in 1952.
He laid the foundations for India’s independent legislature. He tried to ensure that Parliament held the government accountable and secured the independence of its secretariat. He established new committees and healthy conventions by appointing Opposition members as chairpersons.
And when the government issued ordinances, bypassing Parliament, he told PM Nehru, “…We, as the first Lok Sabha, carry a responsibility of laying down traditions. It is not a question of present personnel in the Government but a question of precedents; and if this Ordinance issuing is not limited by convention, only to extreme and very urgent cases, the result may be that, in future, the Government may go on issuing Ordinances giving the Lok Sabha no option but to rubber-stamp the Ordinances.”
However, the Opposition was critical of his refusal to admit their adjournment motions (a parliamentary device for discussing a particular issue rather than the scheduled business of the House). Mavalankar was of the opinion that, after Independence, the government was responsible to the legislature, and MPs should utilise the rules available to hold the government to account. His rejection of adjournment motions drew the ire of Opposition MPs, who eventually moved a resolution for his removal.
S S More, a first-time member who had stood against Mavalankar in the 1952 Speaker election, started the debate. He framed the debate as one of parliamentary rights and government accountability. He said that the Speaker’s rejection of questions and adjournment motions restricted the Opposition’s ability to hold the government accountable. He ended his speech by reminding PM Nehru that “democracy cannot be developed by developing a sort of partisan spirit — a fanatical partisan spirit — which is not proper according to the fundamental concepts of democracy…”
Dr Khare, who had a run-in with the Speaker a few days earlier, was more direct. He called the Speaker’s decisions arbitrary, designed to suppress the revelation of facts unfavourable to the government.
PM Nehru defended Mavalankar and called the Opposition’s motion “vicious” and the Opposition’s charges “an exhibition of incompetence, frivolity and lack of substance”. He reminded the House that the motion of removal is an extraordinary procedure, justified under extremely grave circumstances. He said that the wording used in the motion was “a gross abuse of one’s intelligence” and “to ask anybody in the House to support this is to consider that man utterly lacking in intelligence”.
Lok Sabha MPs then defeated the motion to remove Speaker Mavalankar by a voice vote.
The writer looks at issues through a legislative lens and works at PRS Legislative Research
G V Mavalankar, India’s first Speaker 
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