The Bihar assembly on Tuesday remained in turmoil over alleged insult of Speaker Vijay Kumar Sinha by Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, neither of whom turned up at the House even as the Opposition had a field day fishing in troubled waters.
Members of the Rashtriya Janata Dal, the principal opposition party which also has the largest number of MLAs, made their intentions known at the outset when they reached the premises wearing black badges as a mark of protest against the CM's behaviour the previous day which, they insisted, smacked of his disdain towards the House of elected representatives.
Uproarious scenes were witnessed no sooner than senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader Prem Kumar took the chair even as the speaker remained seated inside his chamber.
The chief minister spent the day at Maner Sharif, a Sufi shrine on the outskirts of the city.
The absence of Sinha and Kumar, just a day after the showdown, led many to smell a rat.
"The Opposition wants to disrupt the House under one pretext or the other. But the current episode is sending a wrong message. The top leadership of JD(U) and BJP should break the deadlock," rued saffron party MLA Pawan Jaiswal.
However, the day belonged to the Opposition.
Their leader Tejashwi Yadav was away campaigning for legislative council elections though he dropped hints, before departure, that the agenda has been set.
"We have always held that bureaucracy in the state was running amok under the leadership of Nitish Kumar. The speaker, too, became a victim when he found that even low-rung police officials were not listening to him in his own assembly segment,"Yadav told reporters.
"How demeaning was the CM's body language yesterday? The way he waved his finger at the chair and questioned its authority... We have learnt that no matter how acrimonious the situation may be, the chair must always be addressed with due respect," said the former deputy CM.
A piquant situation arose in the Bihar assembly on Monday when Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and Speaker Vijay Kumar Sinha had a heated exchange over whether a matter being probed by the government, which has also been referred to the privilege committee, could be raised on the floor of the House 'again and again.'
Kumar expressed his outrage when the speaker asked cabinet minister Bijendra Yadav to apprise the House, after a couple of days, of the steps taken in an incident involving police action in Lakhisarai, which also happens to be Sinha's assembly constituency.
Seeking to drive a wedge between the chief minister, who controls the Janata Dal-United and the Bharatiya Janata Party to which the speaker belongs, Yadav, during the day, remarked, tongue in cheek that the saffron party "should die of shame" (chullu bhar paani mein doob marna chahiye) for agreeing to put up with so much for the sake of power.
Inside the House, the belligerence of his party MLAs first led to adjournment of the proceedings till 2 pm, within minutes of session commencement at 11 am.
At 2 pm, finding Prem Kumar again in the chair, opposition leaders trooped into the well demanding that the speaker be called and the chief minister be asked to apologise. Within a few minutes, the House was again adjourned till 4.50 pm.
When the House re-assembled, the sight of the speaker still not in the chair led to a flare up and the opposition MLAs staged a walkout as Prem Kumar hastily led the House in completing the day's business.
"The chief minister had alleged in front of the entire House that the Speaker did not know the Constitution. Either the Speaker should resign in protest against the humiliation, or the CM should step down by way of repentance," RJD MLA Akhtarul Iman told reporters.
The goings on in the assembly also echoed in the legislative council where former chief minister and Tejashwi Yadav's mother Rabri Devi made a number of remarks referring to the BJP's continuance in power despite the insults heaped on it.
She had risen to intervene when a reference to the previous day's incident by her party colleague Sunil Singh evoked angry retorts from MLCs of the NDA. Taking part in the debate on budget, Singh had invidiously underscored that the BJP had very few of the plum ministries and "dynamic" cabinet ministers like Syed Shahnawaz Hussain, who held industries portfolio, were done in by the domineering chief minister who "firmly believes Bihar can have no industrial growth".
The chair helplessly told Rabri Devi that her remarks were "unparliamentary" and, hence, being expunged.
