On Rijiju’s Nehru Defence, Parliamentary Decorum, and a Civilisation That Cannot be Claimed in Parts
When Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kiren Rijiju rose to defend Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla against the no-confidence motion, he did something inadvertent and instructive: he cited Jawaharlal Nehru. He invoked Nehru’s argument during the 1954 debate against Speaker G.V. Mavalankar — that a motion of this character is an extraordinary procedure, justified only under the gravest circumstances. The argument was meant to shield Birla. It has the opposite effect. Because Nehru, in citing that standard, applied it himself. The question the government has now placed before the country is whether it is willing to be measured by the same.
This is a party that has spent three decades systematically delegitimising Nehru — his foreign policy, his economic vision, his place in the national memory. Nehru has been held responsible, by this dispensation and its ideological ecosystem, for virtually every failure in Indian history from 1947 onwards. To invoke him now, in Parliament, as a moral authority, is not merely ironic. It is a concession. It is the ruling party acknowledging, under pressure, that the first Prime Minister set a standard it needs. Let us apply that standard then — without selective quotation, without editorial grace. Let us apply it fully.
The Benchmark They Invoked
Ganesan VenkatasubbaMavalankar — the first Speaker of the Lok Sabha — was not merely a procedural figure. He was a stalwart of the freedom struggle, a close associate of Gandhi and Sardar Patel, a man whose entire public life had been forged in the independence movement. His credibility was not institutional. It was civilisational. It was earned through sacrifice. The 1954 motion against him failed, and it failed in part because Nehru — who held a majority so commanding that he could have dismissed the debate with a whip — chose not to. He allowed his MPs to speak and vote by conscience. He did not issue a three-line whip. He treated Parliament as a deliberative body rather than a division lobby.
This is what is being compared. Not merely the procedural parallels. The moral ones. The first Speaker was a freedom fighter. His successor Balram Jakhar, who served two consecutive terms from 1980 to 1989, came with a credible democratic background and was widely respected across party lines. He too navigated a House where his party held enormous majorities, yet maintained the appearance of impartiality the chair demands.
And Nehru — with his monumental majorities, with no genuine threat of losing the vote — allowed the debate to proceed as a matter of institutional dignity. He did not need to. He chose to. That choice is the standard Rijiju has now cited. The present government, facing this motion with equally overwhelming numbers, has issued a three-line whip to its MPs. It will win the vote. It has ensured that no conscience will be allowed to speak. In invoking Nehru, it has exposed itself.
The Speaker Being Defended
Om Birla is a three-term BJP MP from Kota, Rajasthan, elevated to the Speakership in 2019 in a decision that surprised many observers — he was not a particularly prominent parliamentary figure and had no prior reputation for the institutional independence the chair requires. His assets, declared to the Election Commission, grew from approximately two crore rupees in 2014 to over ten crore rupees in 2024 — a 311 percent increase over a decade during which he served simultaneously as MP and Speaker. This is not in itself evidence of wrongdoing; declared assets can reflect legitimate growth. But it is a number that invites scrutiny when the same man is being presented as an impartial constitutional guardian.
The scrutiny does not stop there. In March 2018, the Times of India reported that Mahendra Gautam — who served as Birla’s personal assistant from 2003 to 2017, a period of fourteen years — wrote to the Prime Minister, the Supreme Court, and local police alleging illegal and corrupt activities by the MP. The dispute arose, Gautam claimed, over Birla’s alleged demand for a share in a petrol pump allotted to Gautam’s sister in 2012. Gautam said he had received threats to his life and was seeking protection from authorities. In 2019, the same publication reported that Gautam had filed a petition before the Rajasthan High Court alleging that Birla had amassed disproportionate assets and held benami properties worth crores — among the specific claims, a destination wedding for his daughter reportedly costing twenty crore rupees. The High Court dismissed the case after the petitioner withdrew it. The Hindu noted the same set of allegations in June 2019. Birla denied everything, describing the claims as false and previously dismissed by police.
A withdrawn petition is not a conviction. Birla has not been found guilty of any offence and the legal proceedings concluded without adverse findings. What the episode nonetheless constitutes is a documented record of specific and serious allegations by a man who spent fourteen years working beside him — allegations detailed enough to reach the courts, the Prime Minister’s office, and the Supreme Court, and sourced enough to be reported by two of India’s major newspapers. Mavalankar faced no such history. Jakhar faced no such history. The comparison the government has chosen to invite now stands in its full dimensions.
Inside the House, the record is documented and specific. Birla has presided over the suspension of an unprecedented hundred opposition MPs in the 17th Lok Sabha alone — a figure with no parallel in Indian parliamentary history. A further forty-six were suspended from the Rajya Sabha in the same period. The post of Deputy Speaker has remained vacant for nearly seven years, flouting the spirit of Article 93 of the Constitution. When Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi sought to cite a published article quoting the former Army Chief’s memoir on the Galwan clash, Birla invoked Rule 349 to bar him. When BJP MP Nishikant Dubey subsequently brandished books at length on the floor of the House in apparent violation of the same rule, Birla did not intervene. When Birla later told the House that he had advised the Prime Minister not to enter because women Congress MPs had gathered near the chair, no comparable rebuke was offered for Dubey’s earlier defiance of the Speaker’s own ruling.
One hundred and eighteen MPs signed the no-confidence motion. Prime Minister Modi, speaking at a function to lay the foundation stone for the Kota airport forty-eight hours before the debate, described Birla as transcending party lines and tolerating even the harshest words with patience. The timing of that testimonial — a sitting Prime Minister publicly endorsing a Speaker two days before that Speaker’s removal is voted on — does not suggest an institution guarding its own neutrality. It suggests a regime protecting its own arrangement.
On Civilisation and Crudity
The government’s defence of parliamentary decorum, delivered by ministers who have consistently modelled its opposite, deserves particular examination. Civilisation — in the precise sense of being civilised — rests on two foundational postulates: respect for life, and respect for knowledge. A polity that has failed both tests cannot credibly claim the mantle of civilised conduct in any forum, parliamentary or otherwise.
On respect for life, the record is a catalogue of disregard. The demonetisation of 2016 was announced without preparation, without adequate replacement currency, and without evident concern for those who depended on cash for daily survival. People died standing in bank queues. The deaths were noted, then set aside. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the government oversaw one of the most catastrophic humanitarian failures in independent India’s history. The lockdown announced with four hours’ notice sent millions of migrant workers onto highways on foot — their food, shelter, and dignity sacrificed to an administrative timetable. The official death toll was suppressed in ways that independent researchers, epidemiologists, and international institutions have since challenged by orders of magnitude. The dead were managed as a data problem. The pattern repeats in the handling of protests and insurgencies, where collateral damage is acknowledged in bureaucratic language and then filed away.
On respect for knowledge, the damage has been structural and deliberate. India’s universities — once autonomous institutions that could shelter dissent, protect heterodox inquiry, and produce genuine excellence — have been progressively subordinated to political loyalty. Vice Chancellors are appointed for compliance rather than distinction. Faculty are disciplined for their views. The NEET examination scandal exposed the degree to which even the narrow gateway of merit-based selection has been compromised. The institutions that take longest to build and fastest to destroy have been handed to people whose primary qualification is partisanship. This is a regime that has made a quiet ideology of mediocrity — elevating the compliant over the capable at every level of public life — and it has the audacity to invoke parliamentary standards.
The Repudiation of Shame
There is a specific political failure worse than ordinary corruption or incompetence: the failure of shame. A political culture retains its capacity for self-correction as long as it retains the capacity for shame — the recognition that a standard has been violated, that an accounting is owed. Shame is the mechanism by which democratic institutions repair themselves. When it is absent, the capacity for repair goes with it.
This government has not merely failed to acknowledge its failures. It has systematically inverted them — presenting the suppression of dissent as the maintenance of order, the silencing of opposition as the protection of decorum, the deployment of institutional power against political opponents as constitutional propriety. Rijiju citing Nehru is of a piece with this inversion. It takes the authority of the man they have spent years dismantling and uses him as a shield the moment his name becomes useful.
But the citation cuts both ways. Nehru did not use the whip. Nehru allowed the debate to proceed on its merits. Nehru’s Speaker was a man whose moral authority had been forged in a freedom struggle, not accumulated through fourteen years of allegations from his own former personal assistant, not presiding over a constituency city whose young were dying in unremarked numbers. Nehru’s Parliament debated its government’s gravest failures not because the opposition forced it through procedural devices but because the presiding culture of the institution permitted it.
One hundred and eighteen MPs have formally placed on record their loss of confidence in this Speaker. The government will outvote them. It will win the division with a whipped majority, declare the matter settled, and proceed. The irony is complete: in defending the Speaker by citing the standard Nehru applied, the government has confirmed exactly why the motion was necessary. You cannot claim a civilisation selectively. You cannot invoke its finest moments while presiding over its coarsest ones.
Nehru is not available for selective quotation. He comes with his entire record — and with the demand that those who cite him be measured by it.
