 "Om Birla")
New Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla represents the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) top leadership’s efforts at pitchforking ‘loyal party karyakartas’ to key positions.
In picking his new council of ministers, Prime Minister Narendra Modi dropped several ministers from his previous government who were considered ‘outsiders’, including such names as Suresh Prabhu, Maneka Gandhi, Jayant Sinha and Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore.
BJP’s Thaawarchand Gehlot, the Union social justice and empowerment minister who started his career as a factory worker in Ujjain, is now the Leader of the House in the Rajya Sabha.
Birla, second term BJP MP from Rajasthan’s Kota-Bundi Lok Sabha constituency and a lifelong party worker, was the surprise pick for the Speaker’s post. Birla, 56, also marks a generational change. He has succeeded 76-year-old Sumitra Mahajan as the Speaker. Mahajan did not contest the Lok Sabha polls when the party leadership indicated it might deny her the party ticket.
The trend seems to have influenced the Congress as well with Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury. A fifth-term Lok Sabha MP who describes himself as “under matric”, Chowdhury is now his party’s leader in the Lok Sabha, having pipped such colleagues as Shashi Tharoor and Manish Tewari to the post.
Birla, unanimously elected Speaker on Wednesday, was first elected to the Lok Sabha in 2014 but is relatively unknown in national politics. In Rajasthan, he has been associated with social work, the cooperative movement and consumer protection initiatives.
He is a three-term Rajasthan legislative Assembly member from the Kota South constituency, winning in 2003, 2008 and 2013. Birla was the parliamentary secretary with the rank of minister of state in the Vasundhara Raje government during 2003-08.
In his profile on the Lok Sabha website, Birla describes himself as someone who has helped “physically and financially” the poor, helpless and those suffering from thalassemia and cancer. “Led rescue operations with providing shelter, food and medical facilities to victims of natural disasters,” it states.
The profile goes on to claim that Birla has “distributed free tricycles, wheelchairs, hearing aids” to the differently abled, organised blood donation, afforestation drives and “regularly trying to eradicate malnutrition and unemployment”, particularly in tribal areas of Rajasthan.
Interestingly, his profile on the Lok Sabha website until Wednesday morning, when the BJP first revealed his name as the National Democratic Alliance candidate for the Speaker’s post, stated that Birla was imprisoned in Uttar Pradesh owing to active participation in Ram Mandir construction movement. He also identified himself as a primary member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Neither of the two details find a mention in his updated profile.
The profile does talk at some length about his efforts at organising sporting events and cultural programmes with Nehru Yuvak Kendra from 2006 onwards, and “patriotic programmes, Azadi ke Swar, on Independence Day in remembrance of patriotism, sacrifices and spirit of nationalism of martyrs”. Birla has organised several campaigns to collect clothes, medicines and blankets for the poor.
Birla comes from a relatively affluent background. He succeeded his father Shrikrishna Birla into the cooperative movement. He has been the chairperson of the Rajasthan Rajya Sahakari Upbhokta Sangh from 1992 to 1995 and vice-president of the National Cooperative Consumers’ Federation of India in New Delhi.
He was also an active youth leader of the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM), the youth wing of the BJP during his college days and subsequently worked his way up the organisation to be its national vice president for six years. BJP’s current working president J P Nadda headed the BJYM at the time. He is a commerce postgraduate from Ajmer’s Maharishi Dayanand Saraswati University. His wife is a doctor and the couple have two daughters.
Friends, associates and rivals agree Birla to be an affable person with a perennial smile on his face. However, he has faced his share of controversy, but the Rajasthan High Court earlier this year dismissed a case of disproportionate assets filed by his former private secretary Mahendra Gautam.
Although a three-term Rajasthan legislator, Birla is in only his second Lok Sabha term and his becoming the Speaker is a departure from the trend of the last decade and a half where experienced multiple-term MPs were elected to the post. In 2004, 10-term Lok Sabha MP Somnath Chatterjee was elected the Speaker. Five term Lok Sabha MP Meira Kumar succeeded him in 2009 while eight-term MP Sumitra Mahajan was elected the Lok Sabha speaker in 2014.
However, there have been exceptions to this as well. Manohar Joshi, who was elected as the Lok Sabha speaker in 2002, was then a first-time MP but had spent nearly two decades as a member of the Maharashtra Legislative Council and Assembly before that. Joshi had succeeded GMC Balayogi, a second-time MP, who died in a helicopter crash.
In 1980, Indira Gandhi-led Congress party nominated Balram Jakhar, a debutante Lok Sabha MP, as Speaker. Jakhar remained the Speaker for two terms – from 1980 to 1984 and then again from 1984 to 1989. Jakhar was a two-term Punjab Assembly member before he was elected to the Lok Sabha in 1980.
