Parliament Houses adjourned sine die two days before schedule

The monsoon session closed without a debate on Pegasus snooping that the Opposition had been demanding

Narendra Modi, Sonia Gandhi and Adhir Choudhary with Speaker Om Birla (extreme left) on Wednesday. The Speaker had invited prominent leaders of the House to his chamber and urged them to ensure more productive sessions in the future, according to sources: PTI

TT Bureau   |   New Delhi   |  12.08.21: The monsoon session of Parliament was on Wednesday cut short by two days without a discussion on the Pegasus controversy and after a bill to privatise general insurance companies was passed in the Rajya Sabha behind a wall of marshals.

Hours after Rajya Sabha Chair Venkaiah Naidu cried and said he spent a sleepless night after the “acts of sacrilege” in the House on Tuesday when an Opposition MP clambered atop a table, the situation turned for the worse in the evening during the passage of the insurance bill.

The Opposition alleged that some of the women members had been pushed back by male marshals while the government insisted it was the other way round.

NCP leader and Rajya Sabha MP Sharad Pawar later told reporters: “In my 55 years of parliamentary career, I never saw the way the women MPs were attacked today (in the Rajya Sabha). More than 40 men and women were brought into the House from outside. It is painful. It is an attack on democracy."

Leader of the House Piyush Goyal demanded a special committee to look into this so that stern action can be taken against those guilty.

The Parliament session had started on July 19 and was scheduled to run till Friday. No reason was cited for the early closure.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi was seen in the House for the first time after the day the monsoon session had commenced. Home minister Amit Shah too was spotted. The Opposition had been demanding a discussion on Pegasus in the presence of the duo.

“I saw Prime Minister Modi for the first time today. When everything is over, he shows up,” Congress’s leader in the Lok Sabha Adhir Chowdhury told reporters later. “Except for the OBC bill, the government passed bills without discussion within minutes, setting a record,” he added.

On Wednesday, the Lok Sabha assembled in the morning as usual and after some obituary references, Speaker Om Birla adjourned the House sine die. While the Lok Sabha called it a day in the morning without transacting any business, the Rajya Sabha followed in the evening.

Birla said the four-week monsoon session had transacted business for only 21 hours, adding that he was “hurt by the obstructions”.

The Rajya Sabha’s productivity was 28 percent, down from an average of 95 percent in the previous five sessions.

Despite the uproarious protests by the Opposition seeking to stall the proceedings over the demand for a debate on Pegasus, the government succeeded in introducing and passing most of the bills it had scheduled.

As in the Lok Sabha, the Opposition called a ceasefire in the Rajya Sabha on Wednesday to robustly back the bill to restore the right of state governments to maintain their own OBC lists.

But after the bill was passed, the Opposition was back on its feet, objecting to the government’s bid to push ahead with the General Insurance Business (Nationalisation) Amendment Bill without referring it to a parliamentary panel for greater scrutiny. After a brief adjournment found no meeting point, the government passed the bill amid protests followed by an Opposition walkout.

Earlier in the day, Lok Sabha Speaker Birla had invited Modi, Congress president Sonia Gandhi and other prominent leaders of the House to his chamber and urged them to ensure more productive sessions in the future, according to sources.

Modi and Sonia sat on adjoining sofas along with other BJP and Opposition leaders, the sources said.