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Going by the rules, the suspensions of seven Congress MPs by the Lok Sabha speaker Om Birla on March 5, for their alleged misconduct during the ongoing session during the previous day, was right. The seven Congress MPs– Gaurav Gogoi, T.N. Prathapan, Dean Kuriakose, R. Unnithan, Manicka Tagore, Benny Behanan, and Gurjeet Singh Aujla– were suspended for the rest of the budget session two days after the speaker warned of strict action against those who troop to the well of the House to protest or raise issues. The Congress and other opposition MPs have been protesting against the communal violence in Delhi, demanding the resignation of home minister Amit Shah and an immediate discussion on the violence in both Houses of Parliament. However, instead of agreeing to the important and urgent demand, the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA) proposed that the violence in Delhi could be discussed in the Lok Sabha on 11 March and in the Rajya Sabha the next day. The government has also demanded that Gourav Gogoi be expelled from the house because he snatched papers from the Speaker’s table. The unruly behaviour of MPs has been a subject of much public debate over the decades. The Modi government, for whatever reasons, has been disinclined to allow the opposition to play its role in total negation of the reaffirmation made by the prime minister. The Delhi riots is a national issue where more than 50 people have lost their lives. Whether the riot was caused by the sins of omission or commission of the Delhi Police under the union home ministry should have been discussed. This was a constitutional obligation of the government and the opposition. Unfortunately, the attitude of the BJP government over such issues is deeply disturbing. The BJP appears to be suffering from convenient amnesia that when it was in opposition, it was certainly not a paragon of constitutional virtue. BJP disrupted so many sessions during the UPA regime where, Sushma Swaraj, then leader of opposition in the Lok Sabha, had declared that “not allowing Parliament to function is also a form of democracy, like any other form”. Arun Jaitley, the then party leader in the upper house also justified the stalling of parliamentary proceedings following the controversy over the allocation of coal blocks. “According to Jaitley, disruption should not be described as preventing work from being done, because “what we are doing is very important work itself.” Indiscipline and disruptions in Parliament are much talked about issues. Not only are disruptions a waste of Parliament’s valuable time, these significantly taint the image of this esteemed institution. Only in an “extreme case of misconduct”, the House may expel a member from the House. According to a comment in the above rule book, “The purpose of expulsion is not so much disciplinary as remedial, not so much to punish members as to rid the House of persons who are unfit for members.” In this context, it would be too harsh a punishment if the government seeks to expel Gaurav Gogoi for snatching papers from the Speaker’s table. Politics in India has reached a high decibel level of hatred and it is time prime minister Modi decide to do something about it or else be blamed for worsening of constitutional norms.<\/p>\n
Unruly scenes<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[685],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-208696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-editorial"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=208696"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208696\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=208696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=208696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=208696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}