Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan’s tenure as the presiding officer was not supposed to have generated the kind of pyrotechnics it has. For the first time in 30 years, there was a clear parliamentary majority in the Lower House, and an Opposition so decimated that not a single party qualified for the post of Leader of the Opposition. The Speaker of such a House was supposed to rule gently, allow the Opposition its space in debates and restore some of the deference to the Chair that more precariously balanced Lok Sabhas hadn’t in the past.
What is even more surprising is that it happened on the watch of the mild-mannered Ms. Mahajan, so identified with the image of an indulgent but proper elder sister, or Tai , that she has officially adopted it on her official resume.
Ms. Mahajan, 71, the woman with the largest number of Lok Sabha victories to her credit, eight in total, was determined to be uncharacteristically confrontationist. A famous story about Ms. Mahajan and other disgruntled Ministers of State in the Vajpayee government goes like this: “It was during Vajpayeeji’s premiership and we were all Ministers of State, but we had no work. Tai organised a tea party for us disgruntled lot; we shared our sorrows, Tai even sang the song mera sundar sapna toot gaya [my beautiful dream has been broken] in a sort of gallows humour to suit the occasion.”
Hardly fits the profile
Sumitra Mahajan quietly built equations with the then BJP president, Kushabhau Thakre, not only to deal with faction fights in the BJP’s Madhya Pradesh unit with the current BJP general secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya, but also to get a separate department of women and child welfare allotted to her under the HRD Ministry. Her actions on Monday hardly fit the non-confrontationist path she has usually adopted in the past.
