House with room for mischief

Trivedi outside Parliament. Picture by Ramakant Kushwaha

 New Delhi, Aug. 3: Railway minister Dinesh Trivedi held meetings in the corridor today after finding his nameplate missing from the door of Room No. 6 in Parliament House for the second time, in a comic tug of war that revealed no rules are followed in the allotment of rooms to ministers.

“I am not protesting…. I am conducting a meeting here,” Trivedi told curious journalists as he sat on a bench outside the ground-floor room. “When I came here yesterday there was a problem — my nameplate had been removed. We put it back again, but when I came here today, my nameplate had been removed again,” he said.

So he held scheduled meetings with former railway minister Lalu Prasad and Railway Board chairperson Vinay Mittal in the corridor.

Parliamentary affairs minister Pawan Bansal claimed that rooms are allotted to ministers by seniority and not by portfolio, explaining the decision to give Room No. 6 to information and broadcasting minister Ambika Soni.

Trivedi, who had claimed the room on the ground that it has traditionally been occupied by railway ministers, cried foul yesterday when he found his nameplate being removed by Soni’s staff who brandished an order from the parliamentary affairs ministry.

Bansal today defended that allotment. “Pranab Mukherjee has got that room (prime space on the ground floor) not because he is the leader of the Lok Sabha or the finance minister but because he is the seniormost leader in the government,” he argued.

But the logic does not appear to have been applied uniformly. Dayanidhi Maran of the DMK had a ground-floor room although he was a greenhorn. Vilasrao Deshmukh, who holds the minor portfolio of science and technology, was allotted a ground-floor room ahead of Ghulam Nabi Azad, Farooq Abdullah, Ambika Soni and Veerappa Moily who are much senior to him and run departments seen as more important.

Bansal, whose ministry handles the allotments, said he went by the cabinet secretariat list for seniority.

But the way that list is structured, it does not appear to rank the ministers by seniority. Rather, the latest changes appear to be recorded at the bottom. So rural development minister Jairam Ramesh, elevated to cabinet rank last month, is the last on the list. The railway minister, also promoted at the same time, is listed just above him. The much younger shipping minister G.K. Vasan, who is a minister of state but was appointed in 2009, figures higher up.

But even the cabinet secretariat list has not been followed scrupulously in the allotment of rooms. Azad, Moily and Abdullah are placed higher up on the list than Jaipal Reddy and Kamal Nath, who have ground floor rooms.

The seniority factor, however, does come into play for Virbhadra Singh who has a ground-floor room although he heads the politically lightweight micro, small & medium enterprises ministry. Virbhadra, first elected to the Lok Sabha in 1962, is a five-term MP and seven-term MLA.

Whatever the logic, the Trinamul Congress refused to buy it and fought to get back for Trivedi the room that its chief Mamata Banerjee had vacated.

Trivedi and party chief whip Sudip Bandyopadhyay buttonholed Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in the corridor and complained about the “humiliation”. Yesterday, Pranab Mukherjee had intervened to have the room restored to the railway minister.

But after he was shut out again, Trivedi complained: “It seems someone does not want me to function.”

Trinamul MPs were muttering this was a Congress tactic to bully the party by humiliating one of its top ministers. The Congress has for some time now been accusing Trinamul of taking over party offices in district towns in Bengal. Mamata’s long-time personal secretary Ratan Mukherjee, who was in Delhi, rushed to Parliament.

The Prime Minister spoke to Bansal, and Trivedi got back his room for the second time. The parliamentary affairs minister assured Mamata on the phone that the matter had been resolved.

Sources said Soni had not lobbied for the room though she was extremely unhappy when she was sent to the third floor by the former parliamentary affairs minister Priya Ranjan Das Munshi. She now occupies a room on the first floor, as do telecom minister Kapil Sibal and commerce minister Anand Sharma.

Other than Mamata’s, two rooms on the ground floor had fallen vacant — Maran’s and Murli Deora’s. Bansal allotted these to Congress ministers Azad and Sushil Kumar Shinde. Shinde already has a ground-floor room but wants a bigger one, the sources said.

Bandyopadhyay said he had also spoken to Bansal about a big party office in Parliament for Trinamul, which has 19 Lok Sabha MPs. The third-floor room allotted to the party is still occupied by Lalu Prasad’s RJD which only has four Lok Sabha MPs now but is refusing to vacate.

The party office allotments are handled by the Lok Sabha Speaker, who is in overall charge of Parliament House. Other than the RJD, the Telugu Desam with only six Lok Sabha MPs has refused to vacate its ground-floor room although that was long ago allotted to the DMK that has 18 MPs. The Samajwadi Party with 22 Lok Sabha MPs and the BSP with 21 have been given rooms on the third floor.