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Some allies of the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government registered their protest on Thursday against the emergence of the Shiv Sena's Manohar Joshi as the lone candidate for the post of Lok Sabha speaker on the grounds that they were not consulted.
"The fact remains that we were not consulted," Janata Dal, United, politician Devendra Prasad Yadav told rediff.com "So how can he [Joshi] be regarded a consensus candidate?"
"There should have been more transparency in the matter," Yadav said, adding that his protest had been conveyed to the Bharatiya Janata Party leadership.
"It is not just myself," he continued. "NDA [National Democratic Alliance] constituents like (a part of) the Samata Party, Biju Janata Dal, Indian National Lok Dal and Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam are dissatisfied with the hush-hush manner in which the BJP leadership gifted the post to the Shiv Sena."
"We were not consulted," agreed Samata Party MP Prabhunath Singh. "I think the BJP leadership has caved in to pressure from the Shiv Sena supremo [Bal Thackeray]."
He claimed that this situation would not have come to pass "if we had been taken into confidence", but refused to say whether he had conveyed his protest to the BJP leadership.
Yadav, who is the JD-U's deputy leader in the Lok Sabha, is seen to be a 'rebel without a pause' in NDA circles with BJP leaders blaming his outspokenness on his frustration at not being given a ministerial berth.
But Yadav rubbishes this notion, arguing that he had given up a ministerial post early in his political career two decades ago for "the sake of principles".
Yadav and two other JD-U members abstained in the Lok Sabha on April 30 when the Opposition-sponsored censure motion on Gujarat was voted upon. His consistent acts of defiance against the NDA have so far been tolerated within both his party and the NDA as 'acts of unavoidable nuisance'.
Singh is regarded as a frustrated NDA constituent for the same reason as Yadav.
Significantly, Manohar Joshi flew down to Mumbai on Wednesday soon after his candidature for the speaker's post was announced to meet Thackeray and accept his 'blessings'.
A BJP vice-president admitted that apart from some JD-U and Samata Party members, the DMK and the Biju Janata Dal are unhappy with Manohar Joshi's (impending) assumption of the speaker's office.
But he said the BJP leadership was persuading the disgruntled NDA parliamentarians not to make an issue of the controversy and hoped that everything would fall in place.
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