Lok Sabha Deputy Speaker Vacancy Hits Record in 2025

The Hindu

a day ago

Published : Aug 09, 2025 18:29 IST - 7 MINS READ
When the monsoon session of Parliament began on July 21, it marked a dubious milestone in the history of the Lok Sabha: the Lower House had gone without a Deputy Speaker for a record 2,249 days. This more than six-year-long vacancy spans the entirety of the previous (2019–24) Lok Sabha and five sessions so far in the current one.
The unprecedented delay in filling up the post, critics of the present dispensation and constitutional experts said, runs contrary to the spirit of the Constitution and is reflective of the huge gulf between the ruling and the opposition sides.
Says Article 93 of the Constitution, which pertains to the election of the Speaker and the Deputy Speaker of the Lok Sabha: 'The House of the People shall, as soon as may be, choose two members of the House to be respectively Speaker and Deputy Speaker thereof and, so often as the office of Speaker or Deputy Speaker becomes vacant, the House shall choose another member to be Speaker or Deputy Speaker, as the case may be.'
As per Article 95 of the Constitution, while the office of the Speaker is vacant, the duties of the office shall by performed by the Deputy Speaker or, if the office of the Deputy Speaker is also vacant, by a member of the Lok Sabha as the President may appoint for the purpose.
'Violation of Constitution'
The constitutional expert P.D.T. Achary said keeping the Deputy Speaker's post vacant violates the Constitution and is a fit case for the court to intervene if approached. 'The Constitution says that as soon as the House is constituted, the House shall elect two persons to preside over as Speaker and Deputy Speaker. Both these presiding officers have to be appointed one after the other at the earliest. If you do not appoint the Deputy Speaker as per constitutional directions, you are going against the Constitution. You are violating the Constitution.'
The Deputy Speaker is not merely a ceremonial post or just a stand-in for the Speaker, according to experts, and this is borne out by the description of the process of election to the office as laid out in the Constitution and also the norms and traditions that have grown around it over the decades.
Interestingly, the Constituent Assembly, while fine-tuning the norms for appointment and removal of the Speaker, rejected an amendment moved by a member that the Speaker should tender his or her resignation, when the situation so arose, not to the Deputy Speaker as had been proposed, but to the President.
In a decision that shows the importance the Assembly attached to the post of the Deputy Speaker, the Constituent Assembly concluded that since the Speaker was elected by the members of the Lok Sabha, the person occupying the post should tender his or her resignation to the Deputy Speaker, who would represent the House.
Former Lok Sabha Secretary General and constitutional expert Subhash C. Kashyap wrote in his book Our Parliament: An Introduction to the Parliament of India that whenever the Speaker is absent, the Deputy Speaker presides over the deliberations of the House and exercises all the powers of the Speaker in the House under the Rules and Procedure.
He wrote that the Deputy Speaker, by tradition, has headed the Budget Committee, which approves the Budget proposals of the Lok Sabha Secretariat before these are forwarded to the Finance Ministry for incorporation in the Union Budget.
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'Under the conventions and traditions that have grown around the Deputy Speaker's office, if he is nominated or appointed a member of a parliamentary committee, he is also appointed its chairman. Also, the office of the Deputy Speaker is usually filled by a member of the Opposition,' wrote Kashyap.
Vinod Bhanu, executive director of the Centre for Legislative Research and Advocacy, argued that the Deputy Speaker's post is not decorative but a constitutional imperative. 'Mandated under Article 93, the role is critical for the functioning and continuity of the Lok Sabha. The Speaker cannot preside over every session, nor should the House be left without a designated second-in-command in times of emergency—be it resignation, death, or removal of the Speaker.'
The Deputy Speaker, Bhanu further said, ensures procedural stability, chairs debates, oversees key committees, and is expected to act with impartiality. 'Leaving this post vacant compromises parliamentary resilience and disrespects both the Constitution and legislative precedent.'
Symbol of bipartisanship
In the initial years after Independence, the Deputy Speaker belonged to the ruling party, the Congress. In more recent decades, a tradition has evolved wherein the post is offered to the opposition as a symbol of the bipartisanship that the Parliament is expected to observe in its functioning, with a member of the ruling side getting elected as the Speaker.
From 1998 to 2004, when Atal Bihari Vajpayee was the Prime Minister, P.M. Sayeed of the Congress was the Deputy Speaker. During the first term of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) from 2004 to 2009, Charanjit Singh Atwal, who was at that time a member of the Shiromani Akali Dal, was elected Deputy Speaker. From 2009 to 2014, during the UPA's second term, the BJP's Kariya Munda held the post. In 2014, when the Narendra Modi-led BJP came to power riding on a majority, there was a break from the convention of offering the post to the opposition. M. Thambi Durai, who belonged to the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, an ally of the BJP, became the Deputy Speaker.
So far, the ruling dispensation has shown little signs of electing the Deputy Speaker, and the main reason for this is believed to be its unwillingness to offer the seat to the opposition, which is present in much larger numbers in the current 18th Lok Sabha than in the previous two terms of the House and has been vociferously demanding the post.
'The long-standing practice of offering the Deputy Speaker's post to the opposition was not just courtesy—it was constitutional wisdom. It fostered bipartisanship and upheld the neutrality expected of the presiding officers. The current scenario, with only the Speaker in place and the Deputy Speaker's chair left conspicuously empty, is a clear sign of creeping centralisation. It reflects an unwillingness to share institutional space, sidelining of consensus politics, and erosion of democratic norms,' Bhanu said.
In the inaugural session of the current Lok Sabha, the opposition forced an election to the Speaker's post when it became clear that the ruling BJP would not cede the post of Deputy Speaker to the opposition. That the office continues to be vacant has been pointed out by the opposition at regular intervals, but the indication from the ruling side is that there is no need for an urgency to fill the post.
Congress president and Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, Mallikarjun Kharge, wrote a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi on June 10, noting that keeping the post vacant does not augur well for India's democratic polity and is also in violation of well-laid-out provisions of the Constitution. He also said that the election to the post has traditionally been undertaken in the second or the third session of a newly constituted Lok Sabha.
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'From the First to the Sixteenth Lok Sabha, every house has had a Deputy Speaker. By and large, it has been a well-established convention to appoint the Deputy Speaker from among the members of the principal opposition party. However, for the first time in independent India's history, this position has remained vacant for two consecutive Lok Sabha terms. No Deputy Speaker was elected during the Seventeenth Lok Sabha, and this concerning precedent continues in the ongoing Eighteenth Lok Sabha,' Kharge wrote.
According to Bhanu, the ruling dispensation is exploiting the 'constitutional grey zone': the absence of a fixed timeline for the election of the Deputy Speaker in Article 93. 'The phrase 'as soon as may be' in Article 93 was never meant to offer indefinite discretion—it implies urgency and responsible action within a reasonable period. Yet, the government has turned that flexibility into paralysis. To prevent such institutional neglect, it's time to either tighten the constitutional language or introduce statutory provisions mandating a deadline,' he said.
However, Achary said there is enough clarity in the constitutional provisions about when the Deputy Speaker must be elected. 'It is very clearly worded in Article 93 that the House shall elect two members to the two posts as soon as may be. It means that the Constitution makes it mandatory for the two positions to be filled at the earliest or on an urgent basis,' he said.
The politics of the day though has trumped constitutional norms and democratic traditions.