It will probably be for the first time in the history of Indian Parliament that the main Opposition party boycotts an official holding a proceeding. We are talking about Lok Sabha’s Panel of Chairperson’s distinguished leader P C Chako. But the BJP is so disgruntled with Chako for the past few days that it has decided to boycott the proceedings in the Parliament whenever they are being chaired by Chako. How it all started was when there was a debate going on in the Parliament about illegal mining. The time allotted to the Congress to speak was over. But Chako, who was then chairing the proceedings, allowed Congress’ Lal Singh to speak. Before this, Deve gowda of the three-seat JD (U) also got a chance to speak for an hour. When BJP’s Ananth Kumar had wanted to speak about the same issue, the then chairperson Thambidurai had made it clear to Kumar that he couldn’t name any person in particular and not put any blame on him; Kumar had agreed to it. But the minute Lal Singh got up to speak, he directly blamed the Reddy brothers in the Yedurappa-led government in Karnataka and called them a “thief” in the Parliament. Lal Singh’s point was that when Sonia Gandhi was contesting the elections in Bellary, who had given unlimited sums of money to the Reddy brothers to support her? When he was going red in the face making allegations, Bellary’s BJP parliamentarian Shanta got up to show her displeasure about it and said that the respected Singh had no right to accuse someone like this and call him a thief. Lal Singh got really annoyed with this and said, “You should keep quiet. You too have got a share in all this.” The entire Parliament was stunned for a moment. Shanta went to the Speaker’s chambers after this and told Meira Kumar about what had happened. BJP’s grouse was why Chako hadn’t stopped Lal Singh from saying something rude like this when he was chairing the house. Some of these parts are even recorded in the Parliament proceedings. Since then the BJP has decided to boycott Chako.