NEW DELHI: With the parliamentary standing committees set to be recast this month, the spotlight appears to be on the Congress MPs Shashi Tharoor and P Chidambaram as the former had been at the loggerheads with his BJP counterparts and the latter is all set to take chairmanship of one of the department related panel. The ministers who previously headed the parliamentary standing committees, including Bhupender Yadav, Meenakshi Lekhi and RCP Singh, will cede the space for new faces.
There are 24 department-related standing committees, which include 16 administered by the Lok Sabha Secretariat and eight by the Rajya Sabha Secretariat. The presiding officers of the two Houses have already sounded political parties on the reconstitution of the committees. Tharoor, who headed the panel on information and technology, had been at the centre of the confrontations with the BJP, with the face-off escalating during the monsoon session when the two Houses were rocked by the Pegasus row. The BJP MPs who are members of the panel, including Nishikant Dubey, had submitted written complaints about Tharoor.
Chidambaram had headed the parliamentary panel on home affairs before his arrest. He was succeeded by Congress MP Anand Sharma. It’s anticipated that Chidambaram will make a comeback to head one of the parliamentary panels.
While BJP MP Jayant Sinha heads the departmental panel on finance, the saffron outfit may field a replacement for him in line with the party strategy to groom leaders in its ranks by giving them responsibilities in the standing committees.
The committees consist of 31 members which include 21 from the Lok Sabha and 10 from the Rajya Sabha. Such committees have tenures for a year, while the political parties nominate members. Some of the outgoing committees are learnt to have completed their reports on subjects taken up by them, which will be submitted to both the Houses.
Some of the dropped ministers like Ravi Shankar Prasad, Prakash Javadekar and Harsh Vardhan, may be accommodated in the standing committees on the lines of Radha Mohan Singh who, after being dropped as minister for agriculture, headed the panelon railways.