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The Speaker of the Lok Sabha: Performing and Consuming ‘Neutrality’ in the Indian Parliament

By Mouli Banerjee

The Indian Parliament has been in crisis for a while now. With record disruptions, protests that have broken out in the well of the House, regular walk-outs staged by Opposition Members of Parliament, and MPs of the governing coalition often disregarding the House’s Rules of Procedure, the democratic legitimacy of the Parliament of India has been increasingly fragile. How does such a parliament interact with and shape broader public discourse? And more importantly, what can the consumption of the parliamentary proceedings, and its iterations and reproductions outside the walls of the parliament tell us about the legitimacy of a parliament in such ostensibly turbulent times? I suggest that answering these questions requires looking at the parliament as a space, and the different elements and actors that bring it to life, through the lens of performance and performativity. To do that, in this piece, I link these broader questions to a particular figure in performance: the Speaker of the Lok Sabha, the elected Lower House of the Indian Parliament. 

The Parliament as Stage, the Speaker as Performer 

The interdisciplinary interfaces of politics and performance provide a fertile ground for this analysis, making it possible to study parliaments as stages, and meaning-making on such stages as a performative process (Crewe and Müller 2006; Crewe 2015; Spary, Armitage, and Johnson 2014;  Rai and Johnson 2014; Parkinson 2012). These processes have a crucial discursive value, creating normative definitions by repetition and reiteration (Rai 2010). But these performances also need to be staged strategically in order for meaning to not just be created but also be adequately consumed

This applies to the performance of all MPs and parties within the space of the Parliament. Here, however, I want to focus on the role of the Speaker of the Lok Sabha in particular, to understand the implications of embodied performances of that role (its generation and its consumption)  within the current Indian democracy. I suggest that the Speaker is a ‘figure in performance’ in more ways than other MPs. By taking on the role of the Speaker, an MP layers their parliamentary performance with an additional role: that of party-neutrality. What tensions emerge, then, between the purported party-neutral position of the Speaker and instances of party-favouritism in a fragile democracy?

The Contentious Neutrality of the Speaker in the Indian Parliament

The position of the Speaker in the Indian Parliament does not imply official neutrality. There is however an expectation of the Speaker’s neutrality, which follows from a slightly convoluted path of explanation. The Tenth Schedule of the Constitution of India, added only in 1985, enlists the “Provisions as to disqualification (of MPs) on ground of defection”. It allows Speakers and Deputy-Speakers of both houses of the Parliament as well as the Speakers and Chairpersons of the states’ Legislative Councils and Legislative Assemblies an exemption from disqualification from their political party on grounds of defection, while they hold the Speaker’s chair, if the voluntarily give up party membership while they hold the chair (even if they are to re-enter the party once they step down from the Speaker’s role) (Government of India 1985). This, compounded with the presiding authority inherently implied in the chair, has come to confer an expectation of neutrality from the Speaker, even as paradoxically the Speaker of the Lok Sabha must not just normally first be elected as an MP on a party ticket but must also in practice return to a party’s folds for re-election in the subsequent terms. There are also no provisions or privileges currently in place to incentivise party neutrality for the Speaker of the Lok Sabha, once they step down from the role. 

Instances of past Speakers of the Lok Sabha performing their expected neutrality have been a part of broader media conversations. Meira Kumar, the Lok Sabha Speaker from 2009 to 2014, stated in a national interview that much to the chagrin of her party (the then-ruling Indian National Congress) she refused to clamp down on protests by Opposition MPs inside the House because they are representatives who must be allowed dissent (NDTV 2012). Before her, Communist Party of India (Marxist)’s Somnath Chatterjee famously faced expulsion and wrath from his party for refusing to vote on the party line and citing his duty to party-neutrality as the Speaker as his grounds for defying party diktat (Bagchi, Suvojit 2018). The Speaker of the last Lok Sabha, who has captured much recent attention,  Sumitra Mahajan of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), had to apologise in Parliament and expunge her own words from the transcript of a parliamentary debate, after protests from Opposition MPs erupted post her party-biased statements from the Speaker’s chair (NDTV2015).

The figure of the Speaker in performance, especially in the performance of this neutrality, thus is clearly politically charged. Much of the mainstream debate on the Speaker’s neutrality takes on a normative tone, i.e. it is framed in terms of whether or not, and to what extent, the Speaker can justly be party-neutral. Employing the lens of performance-performativity instead allows us to step outside this normative reading, and locate the ways in which these claims of neutrality function as a potent tool not only to signal a balanced parliamentary discourse inside the House but to also allow a discursively charged transmission of these embodied performances outside of its walls and into public discourse. 

The Parliament as a ‘Videosphere’

The witnessing of the performance is key to its existing. I borrow here from critical legal perspectives wherein when the courts transformed people from spectators of justice into witnesses and participatory audiences (Resnik and Curtis 2011, 295), part-taking in the physical space/stage of the courtroom where the theatricality of legal discourse-making plays out (Goodrich and Hayaert 2015). This can be extended to the parliament as well – parliaments are screened and transmitted, creating legislative “videospheres” (Goodrich Cf. Peters 2014, 48) where meanings multiply, destabilize and evolve. 

As parliamentary proceedings in India are transmitted and consumed, on television and online, not just via official governmental channels but as material for proliferating news media, how do the Speaker’s performances multiply and proliferate? With every new ‘reproduction’ of the performance beyond original parliamentary proceeding, the performance of neutrality becomes further distanced from the Speaker themselves, and take on an instrumentalised life of their own. This opens up multiple possible avenues of analysis and of future research. I have selected here some examples from video clips of parliamentary debates available on the internet to illustrate my argument.

Which videoclips of the Speaker’s performances, then, do particular media channels choose to instrumentalise, and how do they narrativise them? Some examples from Sumitra Mahajan’s time as the Speaker (form 2014 to 2019) provide us with an entry point to these questions. Hailing from BJP, the right-wing party in power currently at the Centre for its second consecutive term, Mahajan, with a long, successful political career, has been widely popular by her nickname ‘Tai’ (an endearing term for ‘elder sister’ in Marathi) in the Parliament, press, as well as in online conversations on her  interjections in the Lok Sabha (The Indian Express 2014). While the Parliament’s official channel, Sansad TV, maintains neutral thumbnails of Mahajan, it is worth contrasting this with the discursive framing by media channels sympathetic to the ruling party – BJP’s own official YouTube channel as well as the channels of India’s dominant right-wing news media. BJP’s YouTube channel has captioned videos of the Speaker, for example, with “Smt. Sumitra Mahajan strongly censures opposition parties for their irresponsible obstructionism”(Bharatiya Janata Party 2018). Again, telecasting a particularly polarised interaction between Rahul Gandhi, the president of the Indian National Congress (a key Opposition party), and Narendra Modi (India’s current Prime Minister), Republic World, one of India’s leading right-leaning news channels, for example, captioned their video – “Speaker Sumitra Mahajan Criticises Rahul Gandhi’s Behaviour In Lok Sabha” – with a thumbnail that showed a panel of a winking Rahul Gandhi placed next to a panel of a displeased Sumitra Mahajan (Republic World 2018). Another more polarising right-wing channel captioned the same video “Rahul Gandhi COMEDY with Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan” (News Hour India 2019), while the more mainstream national news channel, India Today, reported this debate with the caption “Speaker Sumitra Mahajan Sparks Row For Mocking Rahul Gandhi”(India Today 2019). Most of the polarised video transmissions of Mahajan’s speeches carry thumbnails of her pointing fingers at someone or gesturing to ask for explanations, next to visuals of Opposition MPs with serious faces or downcast eyes. The captions repeatedly use narrative versions of a ‘scolding’ in action.

Performing Rebuke

Of course, all parliamentary performances are open to discursive instrumentalisation by political parties, so what makes these transmissions of the Speaker’s interventions in the parliamentary videospheres different? I would argue that this assumption of neutrality allows the conceptualisation of a framework of “rebukes” to the Opposition, which is operationalised when the parliamentary performance and its visual dissemination come together. It is also relevant that two of the last three Lok Sabha Speakers have been women, and the gendered aspect of the rebuke and its embodied visuals also contributes to the overall performance of neutrality and the authority derived from it. There is much to be mapped out in order to analyse the full implications of these performances of neutrality (and rebuke) and how they are narrativized by parties in power, but this piece has hopefully laid some initial groundwork in the direction of scoping out the ways in which parliamentary discourse proliferates through the videospheres of a rapidly weaking parliamentary democracy. 

Mouli Banerjee is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick. 

References:

Bagchi, Suvojit. 2018. ‘Somnath Chatterjee (1929–2018) : Remembering the “Gentleman” of Indian Politics | Economic and Political Weekly’ 53 (37). https://www.epw.in/journal/2018/37/commentary/somnath-chatterjee-1929%E2%80%932018.html.

Bharatiya Janata Party. 2018. Smt. Sumitra Mahajan Strongly Censures Opposition Parties for Their Irresponsible Obstructionism. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xT4fcWBIu5Q.

Crewe, Emma. 2015. Commons and Lords : A Short Anthropology of Parliament. London, UNITED KINGDOM: Haus Publishing.

Crewe, Emma, and M G Müller. 2006. Rituals in ParliamentsFrankfurt/Main: Lang.

Goodrich, Peter, and Valérie Hayaert. 2015. Genealogies of Legal VisionGenealogies of Legal Vision. London: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315774268.

Government of India. 1985. The Constitution (Fifty-Second Amendment) Act. https://www.india.gov.in/my-government/constitution-india/amendments/constitution-india-fifty-second-amendment-act-1985.

India Today. 2019. Speaker Sumitra Mahajan Sparks Row For Mocking Rahul Gandhi. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUMA7ig0Hg4.

NDTV. 2012. Won’t Act against Unruly MPs: Speaker Meira Kumar to NDTV. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7ZHZik6UDQ.

———. 2015. ‘Lok Sabha Speaker Expunges Her Own Remarks After Congress Protests’, 2015. https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/lok-sabha-speaker-expunges-her-own-remarks-after-congress-protests-1258172.

News Hour India. 2019. Rahul Gandhi COMEDY with Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDTnIZdn2p0.

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Rai, Shirin M., and Rachel E. Johnson, eds. 2014. Democracy in Practice. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137361912.

Republic World. 2018. Speaker Sumitra Mahajan Criticises Rahul Gandhi’s Behaviour In Lok Sabha | #ModiTrustVote. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O21njBl7MqU.

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The Indian Express. 2014. ‘Soft-Spoken Speaker Sumitra “Tai” Is a Battle Hardened MP’, 2014. https://indianexpress.com/article/india/politics/soft-spoken-speaker-sumitra-tai-is-a-battle-hardened-mp/.