NEW DELHI: The opposition parties on Monday said they will give a notice to bring a motion of no confidence against Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla.
The decision was taken at a meeting of the opposition parties held at the residence of Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge.
Confirming the decision to The Tribune, senior Left front MP NK Premchandran said the Speaker did not allow Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi to speak in the House.
“The Speaker also made derogatory comments about women members of the opposition and suspended their eight members. This is high-handedness and we are united against this. We will move a motion of no confidence,” Premchandran said.
Congress MP KC Venugopal said the House is being run like a preserve of the government and this was not acceptable.
The Lok Sabha has remained disrupted for days since Rahul Gandhi was prevented from making mentions from an unpublished book on the 2020 India-China LAC standoff in Galwan.
The Speaker gave a ruling that Gandhi could not quote from the unpublished work.
The opposition had earlier brought a similar no-confidence motion against former Rajya Sabha chairman Jagdeep Dhankhar in December 2024.
It was rejected by the deputy chairman on the grounds that a mandatory 14-day notice required to be given in such matters wasn’t given and Dhankhar’s name wasn’t spelt correctly.
The motion against the Speaker will be symbolic as the opposition doesn’t have the numbers in the Lok Sabha to carry its agenda through. But opposition leaders said the motion was a reflection of its opposition to the Speaker and the manner in which he’s running the House.
The Speaker had on Friday said that he had asked PM Narendra Modi not to come to the Lok Sabha as anything untoward could have happened given that the women members of the opposition positioned themselves around the PM’s seat just before he was to reply to the debate on the motion of thanks on the Presidential address to the joint sitting of Parliament on January 28.
Ultimately, the PM could not reply and the motion was carried without it. He replied a day later to the debate in the Rajya Sabha.