Lok Sabha seating: Vacant spot in front row of treasury benches could be for next BJP party president

New Delhi: The seat allocation in the Lok Sabha was finalised earlier this week with the front row of the treasury benches being occupied by PM Modi, union defence minister Rajnath Singh and union home minister Amit Shah respectively.

A seat in the front row has been kept vacant giving rise to speculations that it may have been reserved for the next president of the Bharatiya Janta Party who is likely to take over from outgoing president J P Nadda early next month.

In the Opposition benches, while the first seat is kept vacant the other two seats have been occupied by Leader of Opposition Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi, Congress general Secretary KC Venugopal and DMK’s TR Baalu respectively. A circular was released by the Lok Sabha Secretariat on November 29 to this end.

“The first seat in the Opposition benches has been kept vacant, as it is customary, for the Deputy Speaker,” a senior official of the Lok Sabha Secretariat said.

The position of the Deputy Speaker, however, has been vacant for a while now – since the 17th Lok Sabha, the Modi government has not agreed to fill the position, despite demands from the Opposition. The government refused to hold an election for the position in the last session, too, when the election of the Lok Sabha Speaker took place.

The front seats in the adjoining row will be occupied by Congress’s Deputy Leader in the House Gaurav Gogoi, and then by Kodikunnil Suresh.

In the treasury benches, the front seats in the row adjoining to the first will be occupied by union road transport minister Nitin Gadkari and union agriculture minister Shivraj Chouhan, and in the row next to that union urban development minister ML Khattar will share space with JDU leader and union heavy industries minister HD Kumaraswamy.

The front seats in the fourth row will be occupied by NDA leaders – JDU MP and union Panchayati Raj minister Lalan Singh as well as Telugu Desam party leader and union civil aviation minister Rammohan Naidu. Hindustani Awam Morcha supremo and union MSME minister Jitan Manjhi as well as Lok Janshakti Party leader and union food processing minister Chirag Paswan will be seated in the front two seats of the fifth row.

Among the Opposition leaders, Samajwadi Party leader Akhilesh Yadav as well as Trinamool Congress’s Sudip Bandopadhay will be seated in the front seats of the sixth row.

In the seats behind PM Modi, one has been kept vacant and the others will be occupied by union consumer affairs minister Pralhad Joshi, union parliamentary affairs minister Kiren Rijiju, union industries minister Piyush Goyal, union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan as well as union water resources minister Sarbananda Sonowal. Similarly, behind the seats occupied by LoP Rahul Gandhi, DMK’s A Raja will share space with Congress leaders Ve Vaithilingam, Kumari Selja, Charanjit Singh Channi, Tariq Anwar and Manickam Tagore.

NCP’s Supriya Sule, DMK’s Kanimozhi Karunainidhi and Revolutionary Socialist Party’s NK Premachandran will share space in the second line of the second row behind Gogoi and K Suresh, while SP’s Dharmendra Yadav, Awadesh Prasad and Dimple Yadav will sit in the seats behind Akhilesh and TMC’s Sudip B.