Curtains for troubled 14th Lok Sabha this week

It will be curtains down this week for the 14th Lok Sabha, which will go down in history as one which set several dubious records that parliamentarians and people would like to forget.

It will be curtains down this week for the 14th Lok Sabha, which will go down in history as one which set several dubious records that parliamentarians and people would like to forget.

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Different from Lok Sabhas which preceded it, the House witnessed as many as 11 expulsions of members, unprecedented in the Parliamentary history.

Another low was the ‘cash-for-votes´ scam when some BJP members displayed bundles of currency notes in the House alleging they were offered huge sums of money to help the government secure the trust vote on July 22 last year in the wake of the crisis over the Indo-US nuclear deal.

Besides, it saw an ‘expulsion´ of a different kind. Speaker Somnath Chatterjee was expelled by the CPI (M) last year after he “refused” to resign from the high office in the wake of the Left parties withdrawing support to the Congress-led coalition.

Chatterjee, the first Left leader to adorn the high office, was also a target of attack from his party prompting him to remark that “this is the worst period of my life”.

Incidentally, the opposition boycotted the Speaker for a day in the House, which was also perhaps an unprecedented development.