After charging the government with partisanship in the corporate war between the Ambani brothers and demanding the resignation of petroleum minister Murli Deora, the Samajwadi Party has now made a strong pitch for chairmanship of the parliamentary standing committee on petroleum and natural gas.
The announcement of the new parliamentary panels, government sources concede, were to be made during the Budget session that ended on Friday, but got delayed owing to claims made by some political parties over certain committees. They are now expected to be announced in a day or two. The standing committees are important as all government bills are routed through them before the final nod from Parliament. They also oversee functioning of related ministries and ministers are bound to submit reports on the findings of the committees.
The SP, which forced adjournment of Parliament more than once in the just-concluded Budget session on the charge that government was baised towards one industrial house on the issue of pricing of gas from the K-G basin, is understood to have conveyed to Speaker Meira Kumar its preference for chairmanship of the petroleum standing committee. The panel was previously headed by Congress member N Janardhana Reddy. The SP, which will get chairmanship of only one committee, has given energy and information technology as other options in the event that it does not get to head the petroleum panel.
Similarly, the standing committee on railways, which was with the Left parties in the last Lok Sabha, will now go to the DMK and probably be headed former union minister TR Baalu. The decision to deny the railway panel to the Left, which was earlier headed by senior CPIM member Basudeb Acharya, obviously was due to pressure from Trinamool Congress chief and railway minister Mamata Banerjee. With 61 MPs in the last Lok Sabha, the Left headed four committees including railways, labour, urban development and transport and tourism. This time they will be getting just two.
Of the 24 standing committees, 16 will be headed by Lok Sabha members while the remaining will be chaired by Rajya Sabha members. The Congress, being the largest party, will get chairmanships of six committees while the BJP will get to chair four out of the sixteen Lok Sabha committees. The BSP, SP, Left, JD(U), Trinamool Congress and DMK will get to head one committee each. The division of the eight committees in the Rajya Sabha will be divided on the same basis of strength of individual parties in Parliament.