Analyzing Lok Sabha records of 2014-2019, India Today put together data which showed that LK Advani, co-founder of the Bharatiya Janata Party - has uttered only 365 words in the Lok Sabha in the past five years. This is despite the fact that Advani was present in Parliament on 92 percent of the days it was in session.
This is an astonishing drop for the former Leader of Opposition who, on 8 August 2012 - had delivered a speech in the Lok Sabha which panned over nearly 5,000 words on the topic of an adjournment motion over the issue of illegal infiltration into Assam and large-scale ethnic violence in the state, the report added.
However, almost seven years later, when the same topic was brought up in the Lower House, this time under the Narendra Modi government, which introduced the Citizenship Amendment Bill in the House on 8 January 2019 - Advani, didn’t utter a single word.
According to the Lok Sabha records available on its site, Advani between 2009 and 2014, took part in 42 debates and proceedings in the Lok Sabha and uttered 35,926 words, India Today reported.
Comparing his verbal performance of 2009-2014 to that of 2014-2019, there has been a 99 percent drop in the same.
Strangely enough, in the 16 Lok Sabha sessions held between 4 June 2014 and 8 January 2019, which panned up to a 321 days, Advani is 'signed’ present on 296 days (92.21 percent), the report claimed.
The records further indicate that all 365 words that Advani has spoken in the past five years in the Lok Sabha - were all uttered by him in 2014. In fact, he hasn’t spoken in the Lok Sabha since 19 December 2014.
These 365 words were uttered by Advani over five different occasions in the Lok Sabha. Two of these occasions were the election of the Speaker and Deputy Speaker in the Lok Sabha, where he only said - “I support the motion”. This is striking, considering that in 2009, in his felicitation speech after the election of Mira Kumar as Lok Sabha Speaker, Advani uttered 440 words in one go, the report claimed.
Two other occasions where he spoke between 2014 and 2019, was when he had to present reports of parliamentary committees that was either under his charge or of which he was a member. In these occasions, he reportedly read out the name of the report he was presenting and said, “I submit the report on the floor of the House”.
The fifth time he spoke in the House, was to comment on the migrant issue in Kashmir, where he referred to an older report by the parliamentary committee on the issue and advised for it to be revisited and to check whether its recommendations were still valid, the India Today report added.
(With inputs from India Today)
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