Lok Sabha Speaker Election: After Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP Om Birla was elected as the Speaker of the 18th Lok Sabha on Wednesday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, LoP Rahul Gandhi, and Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kiren Rijiju accompanied him to the chair. While moving forward to escort Birla to Speaker's chair, PM Modi and Rahul Gandhi were seen shaking hands with each other.
Om Birla was elected as the Speaker of the 18th Lok Sabha in an election which took place for the first time after two decades. The election was necessitated after the BJP-led NDA and the opposition's INDIA bloc failed to reach a consensus over the post of Speaker and Deputy Speaker in the House.
Earlier in the day, the Mamata Banerjee led-Trinamool Congress (TMC) on Wednesday decided to extend its support to INDIA bloc candidate and Congress MP K Suresh in the election for the post of Lok Sabha Speaker.
The Congress leader will be up against NDA candidate Om Birla. On Tuesday, Union minister Rajnath Singh reached out to Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge in a bid to build the consensus but the talks yielded no result.
Ahead of the election for the Lok Sabha Speaker, the INDIA bloc candidate for the post, K Suresh, said that the opposition is still ready to withdraw its candidature. The Congress MP said that according to him, the NDA is not going to make any offers before the election because they sought support for the Speaker post and were willing to hold discussions for the deputy Speaker post later.