NEW DELHI, Sept 2: The monsoon session of Parliament beginning on September 14 will be without the question hour but a curtailed zero hour with the private members’ bills also dropped.
Notifications issued by the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha secretariats on Wednesday said the decision to drop question hour and private members’ works and curtail the zero hour was taken at the request of the government in view of the Corona pandemic.
The session lasting till October 1 would be held in two shifts — 9 AM to 1 PM and 3 PM to 7 PM. By and large, the Rajya Sabha would sit in the morning shift and the Lok Sabha in the evening since both the houses would be used simultaneously to sit all the members maintaining the obligatory social distancing under the pandemic.
The LS notification read, “There will be no Question Hour during the Session. In view of the request of the Government owing to prevailing extraordinary situation due to Covid-19, the Speaker has directed that no day be fixed for transaction of Private Members’ Business during the Session.” The Rajya Sabha secretariat also issued a similar notification.
The decision to drop question hour has created a furor among the opposition MPs who viewed the move as an attempt by the Narendra Modi government to “murder democracy.” The Trinamool Congress MP its floor leader in the upper house, Derek O’ Brien said the opposition MPs would lose the right to question the government. In a tweet, he said, “Pandemic an excuse to murder democracy.”
He said agreed that in some cases the question hour was dispensed with in the past, but were only during some special sessions. The monsoon session is a “regular session” and there was no justification in dropping the question hour, he said.
Congress leader in the Lok Sabha Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury had written to the Speaker Om Birla last week urging him not to curtail the Question Hour and the Zero Hour. He had pointed out that such a move would deny the lawmakers the opportunity of raising issues of national importance.
Modi government, however, is learnt to have deployed some of its senior ministers to reach out to the opposition leaders to explain the compulsions for the move. The defence minister Rajnath Singh before leaving for Moscow to attend the Sanghai Cooperation Organisation meeting is learnt to have called up several opposition leaders including the Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad, Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, Biju Janata Dal’s Pinaki Misra, O’Brien and a few others.
(Aditya Hore)