Speaker under scrutiny

Three episodes — 2 in state Assemblies and 1 in Lok Sabha — show the need for a debate on the design of the post.

It may have been a coincidence. Two episodes in state legislatures during the same week as the no-confidence motion against Lok Sabha Speaker
Om Birla brought into sharp relief the two contrasting ideas of what a Speaker is for.

On March 16, Karnataka Assembly Speaker U T Khader — a Congress appointee presiding over a Congress government — walked out of the Chair and adjourned the House because the state government had answered only 84 of the 230 questions listed for written reply that day. It was an act of institutional frustration: a Speaker signalling to the executive that the legislature’s procedures are not a formality but an obligation to be discharged.

On March 11, Telangana Assembly Speaker Gaddam Prasad Kumar dismissed the last two disqualification petitions against BRS MLAs who had crossed over to the ruling Congress, completing 10 dismissals in stages since December 2025. The Speaker found in each case that petitioners had failed to produce conclusive evidence of defection, and delivered the final order one day before a Supreme Court contempt hearing because he had resisted acting for months.

The contrast is worth pausing on. Speaker Khader expressed his institution’s disappointment with his own government in public at personal political cost. In the entire record of Om Birla’s tenure — through sessions in which Question Hour was repeatedly sacrificed — there is no documented instance of the Chair expressing equivalent dissatisfaction with the executive’s handling of parliamentary business.

What distinguishes the two is not party but circumstance and stakes. Khader had no anti-defection petitions to decide, no government’s survival depending on his rulings. The structural test of the Speakership is whether it holds when the cost is real. Karnataka offered a glimpse. Telangana illustrated what happens when it does not.

These two state episodes frame what the no-confidence motion against Om Birla, defeated on March 11, was really about. The motion was only the fourth of its kind in independent India’s history. The ruling alliance commands
an overwhelming majority and its defeat was never in numerical doubt.
The significance lay not in the outcome but in what the debate revealed
about the state of Indian parliamentary democracy.

Productivity vs outcome

The ruling coalition’s case rested largely on productivity. Amit Shah cited 118% productivity for the Budget Session of 2025. He also cited speaking-time figures: the Opposition received almost twice as much time per member as the ruling party. The implicit argument was clear: a House this productive, and this generous to its Opposition, cannot by definition be one whose presiding officer has failed in his responsibilities.

But productivity measures output. It says nothing about whose voice was heard in producing it, or whose was not.

The specific complaints the Opposition placed on record — the suspension of 100 members from the Lok Sabha alone in December 2023, the muting of microphones, the Speaker’s failure to act when a BJP member allegedly directed communal abuse at a Muslim colleague on the floor — provided documented content for a structural dissatisfaction already present.

Senior advocate Arvind Datar once compared a Speaker, who remains a member of the ruling party, to an umpire appointed by the batting side. Once elected by a ruling majority, the Speaker retains party membership, exercises quasi-judicial powers over anti-defection petitions under the Tenth Schedule, and manages the floor in ways unreviewable in the moment.

The Supreme Court addressed this structural predicament, without resolving it, in Kihoto Hollohan vs Zachillhu (1992). “The Robes of the Speaker do change and elevate the man inside,” held Justice M N Venkatachaliah for the majority, upholding the Speaker’s power to adjudicate defection petitions. The bench split 3:2.

The minority — Justices L M Sharma and J S Verma — argued that a Speaker whose tenure depended on the continuous support of the House majority could not satisfy the requirements of an independent adjudicatory authority. The Telangana Speaker’s 10 clean chits, delivered under contempt pressure and timed to pre-empt the court, are the minority’s reasoning rendered in operational form.

The 18th Lok Sabha is the first in a decade where the Opposition is large enough to make the Speaker’s every
ruling feel consequential to the balance of power: it means more competing claims on floor time, more contested admissibility rulings, and higher stakes around anti-defection petitions
that can determine the survival of governments. 

As Ronojoy Sen argued in House of the People (Cambridge, 2022), the 123% productivity of the 2015 budget session reflected a weak and fragmented Opposition as much as a well-managed House.

After the motion was defeated, Prime Minister Narendra Modi wrote to the Speaker describing it as a “political misdeed” driven by “personal interest and arrogance”. The government’s position was clear: the defeat was not an occasion for institutional reflection but for affirmation.

Neelam Sanjiva Reddy, who resigned from the Congress on assuming the Chair in 1967, remains after nearly six decades the only Speaker to have done so on his own conscience. Paragraph 5 of the Tenth Schedule permits a Speaker to resign party membership without incurring disqualification; no ruling party has ever required its nominee to invoke it.

The defeat of the motion changes none of the structural conditions that produced it. As long as the Speakership retains its present design, a House with a large and organised Opposition will periodically arrive at this point of rupture.

The question the debate raised, and which the voice vote extinguished, is whether Indian parliamentary democracy is prepared to have a serious conversation about elevating the person inside the robes of the Speaker, as the Supreme Court envisaged in 1992.

(The writer is a senior journalist based in the National Capital Region)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.