Real job of new Vice President: Restore order in Rajya Sabha

As Jagdeep Dhankhar, the Vice President-elect would soon discover, the real job of the occupant of New Delhi’s 6, Maulana Azad Road - the official residence of the VP - is to conduct the proceedings of the Rajya Sabha as the Chairman of the House. Even a brute majority a VP’s parent party might have in the Lok Sabha means little in the Upper House, and their travails to bring the House in order have reduced the most hard-boiled of politicians to tears in the past.

In 1988, the RS saw chairman Shankar Dayal Sharma weep as Rajiv Gandhi loyalists shouted down his attempts at running the House. In August 2021, outgoing VP and RS Chairman M Venkaiah Naidu burst into tears when Opposition MPs climbed tables and threw books over the farm laws.

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Mohammad Hamid Ansari, Naidu’s predecessor and a former diplomat, would find it wiser to leave the job of restoring order to his affable deputies - P J Kurien and K Rahman Khan.

Dhankhar’s challenge would be to run the RS with the Opposition set to get even more combative in the run-up to crucial Assembly elections in 2022-23 and the Lok Sabha polls in 2024. Friends of the 71-year-old say Dhankhar has friends across the political spectrum and the temperament to run the RS.

Intriguingly, despite his public spats as the Bengal governor with the Trinamool Congress government in Kolkata, the MPs of the Mamata Banerjee-led party did not vote against Dhankhar. Mamata met Dhankhar, along with Assam CM Himanta Biswa Sarma, in Darjeeling in mid-July, leading to allegations of collusion from the Bengal leaders of the CPM, Congress and BJP alike.

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Dhankhar, a contemporary of the late Arun Jaitley, both in politics and the legal profession, had a long career at the Rajasthan High Court and the Supreme Court. The two were good friends and a reason for Union Home Minister Amit Shah to handpick him for the Bengal governor’s job.

A Jat himself, Dhankhar started his political career with the Janata Dal when he grew close to Jat leader Devi Lal and was elected to the Lok Sabha in 1989 from Jhunjhunu. He served as the minister of state for parliamentary affairs in the short-lived Chandra Shekhar government in 1991, switched to the Congress and was its MLA in Rajasthan from 1993-98.

In the run-up to the VP elections, the BJP projected Dhankhar as a “kisan putra”, which could come in handy for the party in the Assembly polls in Rajasthan in 2023. Farm distress had contributed to the BJP’s losses in the last round of Assembly polls in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan in 2018. “We are proud to have a ‘kisan putra Vice President’ who has an excellent legal knowledge and intellectual prowess,” the PM said after Dhankhar’s election.