When a group of agitated MPs called on Lok Sabha speaker Sumitra Mahajan on the opening day of the monsoon session of Parliament on Tuesday, she must have assumed they had come to tell her about their plans to obstruct proceedings in connection with Lalitgate and the Vyapam scam.



All set to deal with insistent opposition members demanding the resignation of external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj and Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh chief ministers Vasundhara Raje and Shivraj Singh Chouhan respectively, she soon discovered that the parliamentarians had a far more pressing matter to discuss with her.



The angry MPs, who are otherwise locked in an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation on the various controversies dogging the ruling alliance, sank their differences temporarily to petition the speaker about the closure of the special room earmarked for smokers.



Since the Parliament House premises is a no-smoking zone, a room next to the central hall was allotted for MPs, and journalists, who like to light up occasionally. The smoking chamber had become quite an adda, a meeting place, for MPs cutting across party lines as they chatted amiably over a quiet puff and hot cups of coffee.



It was a happy place, where lawmakers from both opposition parties and the treasury benches would exchange notes about their respective floor strategies, with ministers often pushing their colleagues from the other side to give up their protests and participate in the proceedings.



Among those who have been spotted in the smoking room included Sitaram Yechury of Communist Party of India (Marxist), Saugata Roy and Kalyan Banerjee of Trinamul Congress and Union ministers Ashok Gajapathi Raju, Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi and Kiren Rijiju. A self-acknowledged heavy smoker, Raju was known to be a permanent member of the smoking chamber, spending more time here than in his party office. Raju, who is the civil aviation minister, had courted controversy once when he had publicly declared that he carried his cigarettes and matches on flights.



Nicotine unites



It was, therefore, expected that MPs who visited the smoking chamber regularly were upset when they returned for the monsoon session after a long break to find that their favourite haunt had been handed over to the stenographers, whose old office had been allotted to the Trinamool Congress.



Predictably, there was flurry of activity in parliament on Tuesday as a group of MPs, led by Yechury and the BJP’s Rajya Sabha MP Chandan Mitra, first called on the Speaker to lodge their protest and subsequently followed it up with a signed petition asking her to give the smokers an alternative space.



The protestors must have made an impression on the speaker because she was seen inspecting the room later in the evening and asking her officers about alternative accommodation. Until they get a new spot, the nicotine addicts will be trooping out to the lawns for their regular puff, as they have been doing, although no smoking is permitted in the parliament house premises, including the grounds.



Office divides



While the smokers believe they have a genuine grievance, the Trinamool Congress is not complaining as it has finally been allotted office space that is to its satisfaction. Its MPs had to wait for more than a year for office space as the room originally allotted to hem was occupied by the Telugu Desam Party. The TDP, however, refused to vacate the room, saying its members were emotionally attached to room no 5 as the party had occupied it since 1984 when “the TDP began its journey to Parliament.”



Matters came to a head last year when angry Trinamool MPs tried to take over the room forcibly and even removed the TDP nameplates outside the room, replacing them with their own. This had resulted in an angry exchange of words between the two parties but the speaker and parliamentary affairs minister ignored this scuffle as the TDP is a partner in the National Democratic Alliance government, and they obviously did not want to annoy an ally. The Trinamool Congress was eventually given a room of its choice last month, only after its relations with the Modi government improved.



