 Early Times Report
Jammu, Sept 13: With barely a week to go before the Jammu and Kashmir Legislative Assembly's Autumn session convenes, the Omar Abdullah-led National Conference government still has no answer to a question that refuses to go away: who will occupy the Deputy Speaker's chair?
The delay is no longer just administrative — it is now tangled in coalition politics. Sources say the NC had been weighing an offer to coalition partner Congress: the Deputy Speaker's post, sweetened with a ministerial berth. But that plan appears to be unravelling fast, undone by an unlikely flashpoint — a bitter public spat between the two allies over whether to sing the full version of Vande Mataram.
The optics could hardly be worse for a government already under fire for sitting on a constitutional post for over a year. The NC dispensation, propped up by Congress, the CPI(M) and a clutch of Independents, took office on October 16, 2024. Fourteen months on, the Deputy Speaker's seat is still vacant — and the opposition, led by the BJP, wants to know why.
The arithmetic from the October 2024 polls put the BJP at 29 seats, comfortably the largest opposition bloc. By the book of legislative convention, that should have made the Deputy Speaker's post theirs for the taking, giving the party a formal foothold in Assembly proceedings. Early Times has previously reported that BJP leaders in J&K have pressed the government on this front, with informal feelers sent to the ruling side — met, so far, with silence.
"The post of Deputy Speaker is important for the smooth functioning of the Assembly. It is an established convention that the position goes to the principal opposition party. Since the BJP holds that status, the appointment should be made without further delay," a senior BJP leader told Early Times, speaking on condition of anonymity — adding that handing the post to the opposition would send a "positive political signal" and could even smooth the NC government's equations with the Centre.
The Abdullah government, for its part, has offered no official word. Political observers in Srinagar and Jammu read the silence as calculated: with J&K's political landscape as delicately balanced as it is, the ruling party appears in no hurry to tip its hand.
Technically, there is no constitutional clock forcing the government's hand — the Deputy Speaker's post can, in theory, sit vacant indefinitely. But a 14-month delay is long enough to feed speculation, and more than a few analysts now suspect the NC is stalling by design, calculating that an empty chair does more to blunt BJP's presence in the House than a BJP nominee ever would occupying it.
That calculation will face fresh scrutiny soon. The autumn session opens September 21, and the Deputy Speaker question is all but certain to dominate the corridors before the gavel even falls on Day One. Until then, the J&K Assembly limps on without its second-highest presiding officer — one more unresolved thread in a Union Territory where political uncertainty rarely stays dormant for long. |