Adhir demands 'honourable treatment' for Cong in Parliament, seeks leadership of 'substantive' panel

Leader of Congress in Lok Sabha Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury on Saturday demanded "honourable treatment" in Parliament, uring Speaker Om Birla to ensure that the main Opposition party is given the leadership of one of the four substantive committees -- Home Affairs, External Affairs, Defence or Finance.

This comes as the government told Chowdhury that the decision to take away the Chairmanship of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information and Technology.

The government has also indicated to the Congress Parliamentary leadership that it may also lose the chairpersonship of the Standing Committee on Home Affairs following which Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Mallikarjun Kharge wrote to Leader of the House Piyush Goyal, protesting against the government's move.

At present, the Congress heads three parliamentary panels -- Abhishek Manu Singhvi chairs the committee on home affairs, Tharoor chairs the panel on IT and Rajya Sabha member Jairam Ramesh heads the committee on environment, science and technology.

Lodging a "strong protest" against this "peremptory action" taken "without the slightest justification", he said the overnment was reducing Parliamentary Committees to a "farce if they are unprepared to deal with a committee Chair doing his work seriously and professionally, and a committee serving as an independent voice expressing views that may not always be to the taste of the government of the day".

"If the government is determined to retain the IT Committee for the ruling party, I am writing to insist that as the principal opposition party we have every right to ask for one of the major substantive committees -- Home Affairs, External Affairs, Defence or Finance. At least three of these four have traditionally been chaired by the Opposition," Chowdhury wrote.

In the previous (16th) Lok Sabha when Congress had only 44 MPs, he said, the party headed three of the top four ministries - Home (Anand Sharma), Finance (M Veerappa Moily) and External Affairs (Shashi Tharoor), while Defence was held by the BJP. "Now, with 53 MPs, we have none of these," he said.

"I respectfully request you that, while the government may be within its rights to assign the IT Committee to itself, the appropriate compensation for the Congress party should be to restore External Affairs to us, which was taken away from our party in 2019," he said arguing that by convention, the principal Opposition party must have at least one of the top four committees.

"It is a dismaying state of affairs when the government fails to respect even the most elementary conventions of parliamentary democracy in riding roughshod over our concerns...We are all interested in seeing the parliamentary committee system function well and in the interests of all. The manner in which we have unilaterally been informed of such a decision is an act of disrespect on the government's part for the principal Opposition party," he said.