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After Surviving No-Confidence Motion, Om Birla Returns to Chair With a Rules-First Defence of the Lok Sabha

Edited by IndianRepublic.in - Location: New Delhi, Delhi, India

✍️ Written by Saket Suman

A day after the Lok Sabha rejected an opposition resolution seeking his removal, Speaker Om Birla returned to the Chair on March 12 and used a nearly 26-minute address to frame the two-day confrontation as a test of whether Parliament would be governed by procedure, restraint and institutional authority. 

Speaking after the House defeated the motion by voice vote yesterday, Birla said the Chair was “not any individual’s possession” but a symbol of “India’s democratic tradition, the spirit of the Constitution and the prestige of this great institution,” and pledged to discharge his duties with “full commitment, impartiality and constitutional propriety.”

After Surviving No-Confidence Motion, Om Birla Returns to Chair With a Rules-First Defence of the Lok Sabha
File Photo of Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla
The core of Birla’s defence was clear. Every member, whether a minister, opposition leader or backbencher, has the right to speak only within rules laid down by the House, and no office-bearer is entitled to speak outside procedure. 

That argument directly addressed one of the opposition’s central charges — that Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi and other opposition MPs were repeatedly denied the chance to speak. 

Birla rejected the suggestion that the opposition leader could claim any special right beyond the rulebook, saying the House functioned through rules made by the House itself, “neither by the government nor by the opposition.” 

He cited Rule 372 to underline that even ministers, including the Prime Minister, require prior permission from the Chair before making statements on matters of public importance.

In effect, Birla’s speech was both a defence of his conduct and a broader statement about parliamentary order. He said he had always tried to ensure that every member could raise issues and represent their constituents, including those who were hesitant or did not usually speak. 

He claimed he had personally encouraged such members to participate, even calling them to his chamber and urging them to place their views before the House. The Lok Sabha, he said, must remain the voice of the “last person in society,” not merely a battlefield of partisan assertion.

Birla also moved directly to rebut specific opposition accusations. On the recurring charge that microphones were switched off to silence dissenting MPs, he said the Chair had no button to turn microphones on or off and that, under House procedure, only the microphone of the member formally permitted to speak is activated. 

On allegations concerning women opposition MPs, Birla said he held women members in the “highest respect” and had consistently tried to give them priority in speaking opportunities. He argued that disorderly scenes in which some opposition women MPs crossed into the Well towards Treasury benches while shouting slogans and displaying banners had created an “unexpected situation,” and that his decisions in that moment were aimed at preventing escalation and preserving order.

The Speaker’s address repeatedly returned to one theme: that disorder in Parliament is not a legitimate extension of democratic disagreement. He acknowledged that consensus and dissent are both integral to parliamentary democracy, but said sloganeering, tearing papers, displaying placards and climbing onto desks could not be normalised as parliamentary conduct. 

He invoked past institutional efforts to preserve legislative decorum, including discussions held in 1997 and a 2001 conference of presiding officers, chief ministers and party functionaries, where, he said, a collective resolve had been articulated against slogan-shouting, banner display and paper-tearing inside legislatures. 

He even cited Sonia Gandhi’s earlier view, as recalled in his speech, that entry into the Well should be completely prohibited and that disruption during the President’s Address should not be permitted.

That historical layering was central to Birla’s attempt to shift the debate away from the immediate political fight and towards continuity with parliamentary precedent. He referred to decisions from the late 1950s involving Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Renu Chakravartty and S.M. Banerjee to argue that members have long been barred from quoting or placing documents on the table of the House without first showing them to the Chair. 

His point was less about archival detail than about institutional memory: disagreement with the Speaker’s ruling is possible, but the duty to enforce rules, procedures and conventions remains with the Speaker.

At another level, the speech was also a counter-narrative to the opposition’s political framing of the motion. Rather than treating the resolution as evidence of institutional breakdown, Birla described the two-day debate itself as proof that parliamentary democracy was functioning. 

He said he had stepped away from proceedings immediately after the no-confidence notice was presented, describing that decision as part of his “moral duty” and his faith in the constitutional framework. He thanked members who had spoken in support as well as those who had criticised him, saying democracy’s strength lay in every voice being heard and every perspective being given weight.

Still, the speech did not avoid politics altogether. Birla used official data to contest the opposition’s claim that it had been systematically denied space. He said parliamentary records from the 17th and 18th Lok Sabha showed that opposition members had received more than their allotted speaking time during debates on the President’s Address, the Budget, major bills, Question Hour and Zero Hour. 

He added that he routinely stayed in the House till late at night and tried to ensure that even lone members or very small parties got adequate opportunity. According to him, no member who genuinely wished to speak could produce an example showing that he or she had been denied a chance.

The speech also widened the stakes beyond the chamber. Birla said repeated, planned disruptions damage public faith in Parliament and, by extension, in democratic institutions themselves. If constitutional institutions are weakened, he warned, the harm is not limited to any one individual or party but extends to the nation. 

He linked the dignity of Parliament to India’s democratic reputation abroad, pointing to multilingual translation in 22 languages, the use of digital technology, research support, capacity-building, the successful conduct of P20 and CSPO-related engagements, and the international interest in India’s parliamentary training systems. These, he said, were not his personal achievements but collective accomplishments of the House.

That broader framing matters because the immediate controversy had been sharply political. The opposition-backed resolution, moved by Congress MP Mohammad Jawed on March 10, accused Birla of preventing Rahul Gandhi and other opposition leaders from presenting their views and of failing to maintain the impartiality required to command the confidence of all sections of the House. 

Congress’s K.C. Venugopal said the issue went to the “fundamental principle of democracy,” alleging that microphones were switched off whenever opposition members rose. Samajwadi Party MP Anand Bhadauria said the motion had been brought to protect the dignity of the Chair itself, while also accusing Birla of suppressing the voice of the opposition leader.

The government and the Treasury benches answered with equal force. Home Minister Amit Shah called the motion regrettable and said questioning the Speaker’s integrity was an attack on the trust on which House proceedings rest. 

Ravi Shankar Prasad described the resolution as a political exercise meant to satisfy the ego of opposition leaders, while Anurag Thakur said the motion was not really against the Speaker but against discipline, procedure and equality before House rules. 

During Shah’s speech, opposition MPs entered the Well and raised slogans, reinforcing the very contrast between procedural order and protest politics that Birla later used to structure his own defence.

What Birla ultimately offered was a constitutional justification for authority. He did not concede the opposition’s central claim that the Chair had acted with bias. Instead, he argued that fidelity to rules is itself the only basis on which impartiality can be sustained. 

The House, he said, had always run by rules and would continue to run by rules, “whether some agree or disagree.” He closed by urging members to begin a “new positive and constructive chapter,” to recover the time lost in the special debate, and even to sit late into the night if necessary so that the public sees a Parliament focused on its expectations, anxieties and difficulties.

The immediate trigger may have been an extraordinary no-confidence motion against a sitting Speaker. But Birla’s answer, after surviving it, was to insist that the deeper struggle is over the terms on which dissent itself will be heard, through negotiated disruption in the Well, or within a rules-bound chamber where even outrage must wait for recognition from the Chair.

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(Saket Suman is Editor at IndianRepublic.in, and the author of The Psychology of a Patriot.)
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