The first Session of the newly-elected Delhi Assembly will begin along with the Budget Session of Parliament on Monday. Aam Aadmi Party MlA Choudhury Fateh Singh will be Protem Speaker of the sixth Delhi legislative Assembly. Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal is said to have approved Singh’s name for the Protem Speaker. The seniormost member of the House, Singh, had first won the Assembly elections on a BJP ticket way back in 1993.
This will also be the first occasion when the 70-member Assembly will not be having even a single legislator from the Congress. The Assembly will also witness the smallest three-member Opposition bench of the BJP. There are 67 legislators from the AAP and just three from the BJP. The BJP team will be led by Rohini MlA Vijender Gupta.
With the BJP falling short of the requisite number of legislators, it is now for the AAP Government to take a call on whether it would offer the seat of the Opposition to the 3-member BJP Opposition. Even if the AAP offers the post of the leader of the Opposition to the BJP, it will be for the saffron party to decide whether it accepts such a post, after facing a humiliating defeat in the State elections.
The process of administering oath to the legislators will begin with the convening of the first two days of the Assembly Session, which will be followed by the election of the Speaker and the Deputy Speaker. On the second day, lieutenant Governor is going to make a statement in the House. Following the lG’s address, the legislators will debate on his statement.
Sources said that the lG’s address will focus on the newly-elected Government’s commitment and concern over women security and eradication of corruption from the administrative machinery. It will also focus on the measures that the Government would be taking on the pressing issues, like power and water, concerning the city
A top source in the AAP said that the party’s Shahdara MlA, Ram Niwas Goel, is likely to be elected as the Speaker and its Shalimar Bagh legislator Bandana Kumari as the Deputy Speaker of the 70-member Assembly. The role of the Protem Speaker will come to an end after the election of the Speaker and the Deputy Speaker. In 2014, former Congress MlA Choudhury Mateen Ahmed was the Protem Speaker. It was former AAP MlA MS Dhir who was elected as the Speaker of the fifth Assembly in 2013. Dhir, who contested on the BJP ticket this time, lost his Jangpura seat to AAP’s Praveen Kumar by a margin of about 20,000 votes.
The primary job of the Protem Speaker will be to administer oath to the new legislators and conduct proceedings of the new House till the new Speaker and the Deputy Speaker are elected. Generally, the Protem Speaker is sworn in by the President and an hour later, the Delhi Assembly Session is convened and the newly-elected members are sworn in. The powers of the Protem Speaker are not defined. But the Protem Speaker does not have as much powers as enjoyed by the permanent Speaker.
The newly-elected Assembly will also witness two-term MlA Bandana Kumari, who had won from Shalimar Bagh seat against BJP’s Rekha Gupta by a margin of about 10,000 votes, getting elected as the second women Deputy Speaker of the House. First, it was former Congress MlA Kiran Chaudhary who was the Deputy Speaker during the tenure of then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit. Kumari had defeated BJP’s Ravinder Nath Bansal by a margin of about 11,000 votes in 2013. A Dalit social activist, Kumari was in the news after cash amount of about Rs5 lakh was reportedly stolen from her residence in December last year